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Two towers book summary5/2/2023 ![]() One girl, Britt, lingers after class to express her reservations about true-crime podcasts: for her project, she’d like to choose a topic that Bodie has suggested-the 1995 murder of a Granby senior-but she’s disturbed by the genre’s tropes. (“The dermatologists and orthodontists have finally solved it,” Bodie thinks.) They’re also alarmingly thoughtful. Bodie’s podcasting students turn out to be more attractive than she and her classmates ever were-not on a spiritual level, but because of their flawless skin and teeth. Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. Upon arriving, she is stirred to find that her alma mater, a stony vision “locked in ice and salt,” looks as if it “had been cryogenically preserved.” ![]() Bodie can read “the scroll of calendar-pretty farmland” in ways that the cabdriver can’t she feels every turn of the road in her muscle memory. She was a stage tech who hoarded details about her classmates because, as she says, “I hoped this would help me become more like them, less like myself.” But, as Bodie rides toward campus, Makkai hints that she is not the outsider she perceives herself to be. (“You’re like, Everything you know about Judy Garland is wrong,” one of her students says, with a hint of scorn.) In high school, Bodie wore Doc Martens and eyeliner. Bodie co-hosts a podcast called “Starlet Fever,” which reëxamines the lives of women in film. Would the novel devolve into writerly self-satire? Or would it try to embody a responsible-perhaps even pleasurable-piece of crime literature?Įarly in the book, the protagonist, Bodie Kane, is in a cab going to Granby, New Hampshire, where she will teach a two-week course on podcasting at her old boarding school. ![]() This is a risky gambit, and I had, well, some questions for her. But it also joins a growing number of critiques of true crime, with Makkai charging the genre on three counts: exploiting real people for entertainment, chasing gore rather than studying systemic problems, and objectifying victims, most of whom are pretty, white, rich, and “young, as we prefer our sacrificial lambs.” This last allegation evokes what Alice Bolin, in her essay collection “Dead Girls” (2018), calls the Dead Girl Show, a modern-day myth in which an investigator develops a “haunted, semi-sexual obsession” with “the highest sacrifice, the virgin martyr.” Makkai ironizes a group of true-crime addicts, integrating criticism of the Dead Girl Show into her dead-girl show. The new book, a murder mystery set at an élite boarding school, is being marketed as an irresistible whodunnit. “I Have Some Questions for You” (Viking), the latest book by Rebecca Makkai, embraces the intricate plotting and emotional heft that made her previous novel, “The Great Believers,” a Pulitzer finalist. Eventually, it follows, literature was going to notice. By melding suspense and self-awareness, it brought podcasts into a space previously reserved for literature. Crucially, it also regarded its own genre, true crime, with ambivalence, wearing its nuance like a finely tailored trenchcoat. The series electrified group chats, provided rich loam for conspiracy theories, and turned hordes of millennials into experts on cell towers. These same critics may belabor themes (the fugitive nature of truth, the slipperiness of memory) popularized by shows such as “Serial,” the 2014 blockbuster, narrated by Sarah Koenig, that investigated the killing of a Maryland girl. You can barely crack the Times without encountering a heady profile of some hot new podcaster when critics consider how stories are told-or even just use that language, how stories are told-they are as likely to be discussing podcasts as books. ![]() Maybe it was only a matter of time before the novel took on the podcast. ![]()
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