Review: Rebecca Makkai’s new novel deconstructs the well-worn tropes of the genre
Stories of their deaths lure us to popular podcasts, TV investigations and magazine exposés. Their bodies — or parts of them — electrify best-selling thrillers and blockbuster movies. As a culture, we seem equally alarmed and aroused by these tales of slaughter.,” Rachel Louise Snyder notes that 50,000 women around the world were murdered by their partners or family members in 2017. That’s about six lives snuffed out by a “loved one” every hour of every day.
“Wasn’t it the one where she was stabbed in — no. The one where she got in a cab with — different girl. The one where she went to the frat party, the one where he used a stick, the one where he used a hammer, the one where she picked him up from rehab and he — no.
That Whitmanesque catalogue of carnage eventually arrives at the sad case of a 17-year-old girl named Thalia Keith. In 1995, just after a performance of “Camelot” at the prestigious Granby School in New Hampshire, Thalia was murdered. An athletic trainer — a rare Black man on campus — confessed to the crime, but conspiracy theorists have punched holes in the investigation for decades.
The invitation draws Bodie back with a mixture of nostalgia and dread. The stately school looks preserved in amber, but visiting awakens forgotten and disorienting memories. Bodie recalls the horror of Thalia’s murder, her own tangential role in the original investigation and especially Mr. Bloch, a music teacher whose behavior seems, in retrospect, suspiciously creepy. And so, it’s to him — charismatic, overly familiar Mr. Bloch — that Bodie addresses this entire narration.
In one sense, that’s what this novel is: an attempt — both reluctant and obsessive — to work out exactly what happened 23 years ago and why that crime was so neatly packed away.
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