In 1985, at the beginning of this novel, several young men attend a memorial wake in Chicago. This is not a standard memorial service; it is a party, held at the same time as the official funeral several miles away. The reason for this parallel event is that the young men have not been invited to the official ceremony because they, and the deceased, are gay.
Nico had made it clear there was to be a party. […] If he’d died just two days ago, they wouldn’t have had it in them to follow through. But Nico died three weeks back, and the family delayed the vigil and funeral until his grandfather, the one no one had seen in twenty years, could fly in from Havana. […] Now this ancient Cuban man was crucial to the funeral planning, while Nico’s lover of three years wasn’t even welcome at the church tonight.
Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers takes us back to the 1980s when many young gay American men were coming out of the closet, finding a community, and becoming out and proud. Just as they were finding freedom, in that same period emerged the horror of AIDS.
[Nico’s] illness had been sudden, immediately debilitating — first a few days of what had seemed like just shingles, but then, a month later, moon-high fevers and dementia.
Most such novels have focused on New York and San Francisco, but Chicago too had its Boystown of ‘beautiful young men’. Among them were Yale and Charlie: in a committed relationship that pre-dated HIV, and therefore ‘safe’, although there is the ever-present survivor’s guilt as they watch their friends fall sick. There is Terrence, Nico’s lover, an eighth-grade math teacher until ‘Nico needed him around the clock and Terrence learned he was infected himself’. Julian Ames, ‘too perfect if anything’, and Teddy Naples, ‘a little ball of kinetic energy’, and Asher Glass, fiercely activist, and Richard Campo, who photographed all of them.
And there is Fiona, Nico’s little sister, who had stolen food and money for Nico when he was thrown out by their parents, and is deeply close to all his friends.
[Fiona] “I have two hundred big brothers”
The novel unfolds in two parallel threads; one following Yale from 1985 onwards, and the other thread set in 2015, with Fiona scouring Paris to find the daughter who has broken off all contact with her. Some characters appear in both threads, but inevitably, some of the men have passed away by 2015 and exist only in memories and Richard’s photographs.
This may sound like a grim, sad, novel, and there is indeed a sense of waiting for the next domino to fall, but there is a lot more going on as well. Yale works at Northwestern’s small museum, and has been contacted by Nora, an elderly woman who has a collection of sketches by now-famous artists that she might donate to the museum. Nora, it turns out, is Nico’s aunt, his only supporter within the family, and lived in Paris as an artist, muse and model before WW1. In her stories of the pre-WW 1 artists, she talks about the young men going off to war — some never returning, some returning damaged, and some felled by Spanish flu. There is an obvious parallel to the AIDS crisis.
Meanwhile, in 1985, there are tense practical decisions to be made. The HIV test is now available; who will take it, and for what reasons? Who will tell their partners if they turn out to be positive? How will they react to the likely death sentence? All this in the midst of a torrent of vituperative judgement pointed at the gay community.
“The thing is,” Teddy said, “the disease itself feels like a judgement. We’ve all got a little Jesse Helms on our shoulder, right? If you got it from sleeping with a thousand guys, then it’s a judgement on your promiscuity. If you got it from sleeping with one guy once, that’s almost worse, it’s like a judgement on all of us.[…] And if you got it because you thought you couldn’t, it’s a judgement on your hubris. And if you got it because you knew you could and you didn’t care, it’s a judgement on how much you hate yourself.”
A novel about a group of characters can become an exercise in distinguishing one from another for the reader, but Makkai is far too good a writer for this to happen. The 1980s chapters are told from Yale’s point of view, and the other men appear through his eyes — each distinct, each a person in his own right, with more to his life than Yale knows or can observe.
Makkai’s prose is self-effacing; the reader is always focused on the characters and storyline rather than literary starbursts. At the same time, she has empathy for the characters, even when she does not shy from describing their occasional self-destructive actions.
The chapters set in the 1980s were more compelling than the 2015 story. Makkai does a nice job of tying the two threads together, but still, Fiona’s frantic search for her adult daughter Claire is never equivalent in power to Yale’s life-and-death events, or even to the art history. It would be lovely if Claire and Fiona were reunited, but if not, they would both be fine; in contrast, the 1980s characters are vanishing before our eyes. Makkai beautifully captures the tragedy of losing a whole generation of young gay men just as they are beginning to find a place for themselves in the world.
I wish the novel had been a single timeline with a single point of view, but for some reason that is not a popular approach among writers today.
This one sounds pretty good!
I’ve had a run of good books recently!
In some ways I liked it more than A Little Life. The 4 gay characters in that one were all unusual, strange, unique, whereas in Makkai’s writing they are just normal people who happen to be gay and are caught up in this very tough period for the community.