“If three travelers chance to occupy the same compartment, that is enough to make vaguely hostile “others” out of the rest of the passengers on the train. In small-town eyes all persons not belonging to the village are strangers and suspect.” —Simone de Beauvoir, Introduction to The Second Sex

On packed bookshelves lining the walls of my grandparents’ house, there are mystery novels. My grandfather (“Popi”) once noted that with all the countless hours my grandmother (“Aughma”) logs watching Murder She Wrote, Matlock, and reading Agatha Christie novels — “She must know a thousand different ways to do me in without getting caught.” Whenever there was a missing tee-shirt, toy, Nintendo cartridge or pair of sneakers hidden somewhere in our house, my mother (“Mom!”) would sit me down after I’d desperately scoured all the probable locations and question me. After taking a statement that always included my retraced steps and usually a few follow-up questions, she would stand up and walk directly to the couch, car or bathroom (this was frequent), with me following closely behind, and then quickly uncover the item. Then my mother would declare, “I would’ve made a good detective.” This compliment, self-administered or given, was among the highest in our family.

Alison Clement doesn’t consider her latest novel, Twenty Questions, to be a mystery. I agree with her. According to Hoyle, Twenty Questions isn’t a mystery. However, it isn’t mysterious to me why some might call it that. For one thing, the book begins with a murder. For another, it ends with the murder being solved. In between, there are numerous unexpected plot twists and turns and a few characters that we, the readers, don’t really trust. From that description, it sounds like a mystery. However, in all those hours I logged by proxy watching mysteries unfold, I never once heard Jessica Fletcher or Hercule Poirot discuss how they thought it might feel to kill somebody. The detectives I grew up with collected facts, interviewed witnesses and people close to the victim and stood firmly(from a safe detached distance) on tried and true motives of greed, jealousy, fear or some mixture of the three. My childhood detectives didn’t empathize with their suspects or cook them dinner. They caught them red-handed. My mother never asked me how it felt lose Kid Niki. She lifted up a sofa cushion and triumphantly pointed to it.

So in true mystery form, here are the facts about Twenty Questions, by Alison Clement. I read it in four days of actual reading time. During the first one-hundred pages, I wanted to call Alison and tell her that her writing is “crazy engaging” and that I loved her choices, but instead I was so engaged I just kept reading. When I first finished the book, I wanted to email her and ask her about the ending. After writing a portion of this review, I think I get it. I have a philosophic conclusion I’d like to project onto it about what it could mean (my own attempt to solve a different mystery). I enjoyed this book through and through. In terms of readability, flow and emotion the book is excellent.

But as a smart somebody recently told me (and I’m paraphrasing here), “There are many mysteries that nobody cares to solve. They happen all the time. A lot of them aren’t even about solving crimes.” And this is where we find levels of mystery within Alison’s ‘mystery’ — the philosophical mysteries contained within the literal one. Philosophy is defined by some as “the critical analysis of fundamental assumptions or beliefs.” This seems like an apt way to describe both the story contained within Twenty Questions, the narrator and its messages. So I will describe it as such, playing philosophical detective, outlining the suspects and clues that Ms. Clement has left for us in her mystery.

But before I don my Hawaiian shirt and tennis shorts (the garb of a true modern P.I.), a quick confession of my own here: I took a number of “Women’s Studies” classes in college for reasons irrelevant to this review. In “The Philosophy of Women,” I was introduced to The Second Sex. I took this class during a rare semester when I was working diligently and completing all assignments. The Second Sex is one of the few books I still have and remember from school. It contains turquoise-colored highlighted passages easily located within the text. This might explain why a 28-year-old straight man is writing a review of a recently released novel using an early twentieth century feminist philosopher so joyously as his Rosetta Stone. So without further ado, my philosophical sleuthing and reviewing of Twenty Questions through the lens of existential feminism:

June Duvall is our first-person narrator and main character. And for the armchair philosophical purposes of this review, she’s "the One." I’m not referencing The Matrix but rather the aforementioned treatise, The Second Sex. June Duvall can’t fly or fight multiple Agent Smiths through uploaded kung-fu or even slow down time to dodge bullets. Instead, she is the lens through which we seek to learn about Others. I’m not referencing people that moved into the house where me and my ghost family live, although come to think about it, those Others aren’t so far off from the ones I’m talking about. The Others are those that are so clearly different from ourselves, from our “tribe” and our “kind” that initially we approach our interactions with them similarly to the way we would view sitting down for lattes with space aliens. Gradually, as we can find common ground between ourselves and these aliens, like the fact that we enjoy steamed milk, we begin to mentally categorize them less strictly as Others and more like “green lactose-loving humanoids from elsewhere, not so different from us.”

The first Twenty Questions Other (TQO) we meet through June is a local man accused of murder. The victim of the murder has a lot in common with June. Most notably, June turned down a ride from the murderer just before the victim didn’t. And right away, we have a relatable “other” to most all of us and June, this killer. June is nothing if not inquisitive and prone to tangents of existential exploration. And among June’s many questions, the question of “why did she die and I live?” leads June to visit the home of the victim’s daughter and brother. From there, June is “through the looking glass” and “the game is afoot.”

Throughout an early chapter she tries to identify with a killer in her mind: “Do people who kill try it once and then move on to other things, take up a hobby, get a second job, join a softball team and just get too dang busy to murder anyone? It must take a lot of time and effort. How is it that people who show so little initiative in other ways become murderers? And, most important, what did killers make of what they had done, later? What story did they tell themselves? Wouldn’t they eventually tell their best friend or their wife or, in an impulsive moment, someone in a bar or at a party?”

While barrages of questions like this would annoy me coming from another character, from June they reveal a combination of curiosity, sensibility and empathy that I appreciate. These questions fit with her character and the character of the novel.

June works at a school cafeteria. There, June manages second and third grade students. And who better to aggressively point out the differences and otherness in people than elementary school kids? The children provide the platform to discuss the next TQO, the war in Iraq and those running it. Though June mentions the war too frequently for it to be considered just a passing commentary, it is not overbearing. Rather, it leads to some interesting parallels.

“If an entire country can rationalize cluster bombs, then why shouldn’t a man be able to rationalize his own, private murders? The president could be a hero for launching a bombing campaign that flattened cities, but if a little boy started a fire in his mother’s closet he was locked up.”

Another social commentary present in Twenty Questions is Clements’s honest outlook on a low-income Oregon school system from the point of view of a non-Union non-Teacher employee. June Duvall is present at school administration meetings and privy to school gossip about the dysfunctional families of the children. She watches as children are forced to move, be locked up, or endure home lives. Low-income families are another TQO. At a low point, June finds herself on common ground with the financial and emotional instability she has witnessed in the lives of her poor students families.

As the story unfolds, June’s exploration of the murder victim’s life leads her to an unexpected TQO. June discovers that her husband is not as familiar as she had thought. In fact, he is quite Otherly, indeed. And this is where the book goes into fifth gear. June’s hypothetical questions suddenly hit close to home. The resulting drama that unfolds and the drastic changes in both her world view and her marriage are well-explored in Clement’s skilled hands.

A major strength of the character of June Duvall is her empathy. She can put herself in the mind of killers, adulterers and liars, but maintains her true emotions, intelligence and sensitivity. A transplanted Southerner, June speaks with empathy and frankness that seem to suggest that to her, people are still people, even after they’ve crossed unspeakable lines. Alison Clements’ narrative does not shy away from June’s darker feelings.

A major strength in the writing is in the specific minor details that June Duvall notices. June’s lens captures subtle nuances in the way people speak, appear and the places they live. June Duvall’s observations are sharp when it comes to sexuality and male-female interaction. As she dissects interactions between herself and men and women, there is authority in her words, an understanding of the roles men and women play and when they break out of them. If one day I wanted to describe June Duvall to myself, it might not strike me with surprise that the first thing I would have to say is ‘She is a woman.’

The book keeps a tight focus on June’s emotions, thoughts and relationships throughout. The unsolved murder is the final hook for readers approaching the end of the novel. June has met the poor, the adulterers, liars, thieves and now we wait for her to meet the killer. All of the Others we met with June until now have prepared us for this unmasking. And when the killer is revealed, so is the prevailing philosophical truth contained within Twenty Questions (and my attempt to solve the mystery): there are hidden Others everywhere, if you care to look. The person buying that latte ahead of you in line that looks human is an alien and the alien waiting behind you is more human than anyone you know. Twenty Questions doesn’t solve the mystery of what goes on behind the doors of your neighbors and friends, it solves the mystery of whether or not there is one.

I would’ve made a good detective.