Joyce Carol Oates and Rebecca Makkai draw two impeccable stories about violence against women

The noir genre focuses again and again on the same idea: that of the serial killer presented, whether one likes it or not, as an attractive figure. This year alone we already have a few examples and rarely the result is a Hannibal Lecter. A series of novels headed by the extraordinary Those women by Ivy Pochoda (Siruela) and The woman of the lake by Laura Lippman (Salamandra) have broken that trend in recent times and have focused with particular strength and style on the victim, on the victims, to transcend the noir genre and the fixation on the plot. From a different and, for different reasons, more radical approach, two other first-rate writers (Rebecca Makkai and Joyce Carol Oates) have constructed two novels about murdered women that will not leave anyone indifferent.

Rebecca Makkai's look

I have some questions for you It is a layered story in which, with the help of a powerful narrator (and her power lies not so much in her story as in the author's ability to make us stay with her) we discover the ins and outs of a murder, that of the young Thalia Keith, which occurred many years before. The protagonist, Bodie Kane, was the victim's roommate at a boarding school for posh children and returns to the scene of the crime in the nineties and with it to those years in which she wanted to disappear, to that adolescence of complexes and fears, as a young woman. declassed from Indiana. And that is part of the strength of this book, not because of her ability, with a capital letter, to tell us about that time (something she already did with the Chicago of the eighties in The optimists), but because of how that look into the past is essential to solving the crime: there is a guilty man convicted and in jail, but you just have to scratch a little to realize that it wasn't him.

But it is also an intense approach to the creative process, to the construction of voices in a podcast or to the responsibility of the narrator in adopting a point of view. And an overview of how a reputation and a life can sink with a few social media messages. It would, in fact, be too many things if it were not in the hands of Makkai's solid pulse.

Now, ultimately, the reader keeps wondering if that “you” in the title, that seemingly perfect professor, married with children, handsome and with social and academic prestige, is the culprit. Or if he is a sexual predator but not a murderer. Or if he had nothing to do with it. Or if… At the beginning, the narrator and absolute protagonist is convinced, but she has many surprises in store.

Two non-secondary aspects finish off the novelistic edifice of I have a question for you. On the one hand, the narration of a trial that we never see from the inside and that, however, we follow with passion. And, on the other, respect for the victim (always treated above her death) and contempt for the murderer, far from the tired fascination of many stories of psychopaths.

Another gift from Joyce Carol Oates

M. or Marguerite Fulmer disappeared in New York in 1991. Some time later, her sister, six years younger, contemplates the circumstances under which this event occurred, although she is aware of the tricks that memory projects. But G. (Georgene), which is the narrator's name, has a hypnotic voice through which the reader approaches the details, true or not, of what happened to M. Also to the statements made to the police, and what was never said in front of the agents: a narrator-reader privilege that places the reader in a dangerous and fascinating place.

In fact, whoever enters this 48 clues about my sister's disappearance She has to be careful with this diabolical game, because G. runs the show and reveals jealousy and envy, hers towards a sister who surpassed her in everything, while she plunges the reader into many “maybes” before launching the hook: “ Too many maybe! Yet (this is the alluring promise of clues!) one of these perhaps, however improbable and implausible, is the Truth.”

In his explorations of the noir genre, Oates likes to play with sarcasm: G., for example, says: “How ridiculous! Whereabouts, alibi… clues. Banal and worn-out topics of police investigation like an old threadbare rug that you have to walk on anyway, looking straight ahead in an impassive expression of innocence.” But he also fuses the style with one more typical of the true crime with a list of real cases (something that Makkai also uses) to include these fictional victims in a real and terrifying context.

In what he says, what he does not say and what we sense that he hides or exaggerates, we have a portrait of G. much more complex than it seems, a portrait of M. (of the woman, of the artist, above her condition of victim and despite the distorted perspective of her sister) and, finally, a portrait of the miseries of such an investigation and everything that surrounds it: errors, gossip, sensationalism, clichés, loneliness and silence. Oh, and there is a suspect, believe it or not, and a fascinating wrapper of a classic crime novel in certain sections of the story. A triple somersault only equal to someone like Oates.

Rebecca Makkai
Translation of Aurora Echevarría
Sixth Floor, 2024
500 pages. 23.90 euros

Rebecca Makkai
Translation by Marc Rubió
Editions of Periscopi, 2024 (in Catalan)
568 pages. 23.90 euros

Joyce Carol Oates
Translation of María Dolores Crispín
RBA, 2024
288 pages. 20 euros.

You can follow Babelia in Facebook and xor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.

_