I wrote one review of which I am particularly proud. It is copied and pasted below and came out when the novel was first released, just a few years ago.
The best and most influential book I’ve read this year, The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai chronicles the AIDS crisis in Chicago in the 1980’s juxtaposed by the story of Fiona, merely a girl in the early 80’s who is not only witness to the devastation, but also carries emotional scar tissue that informs her life as she searches for her daughter in Paris in 2015.
At first, I wondered whether Fiona’s story would prove a distraction to Yale Tishman’s story as art curator on Northwestern’s campus museum, but her story becomes fundamentally essentially to understanding how AIDS and the crisis damaged the survivors and caregivers as well.
I also loved art muse Nora’s story, a third perspective, and point of view, as she survived the ravages of death in World War I and the aftermath of the survivors in Paris in the 1920’s. All three points of view drive the narrative.
At one point, on page 252, author Rebecca Makkai writes, “Nora said, ‘Every time I’ve gone to a gallery, the rest of my life, I’ve thought about the works that weren’t there. Shadow-Paintings, you know, that no one can see but you. But there are all these happy young people around you and you realize no, they’re not bereft. They don’t see the empty spaces.'”
As a gay man in Chicago in the early 1990’s, I saw firsthand the empty spaces. Someone would be at Sidetrack’s or Roscoe’s one week, and then suddenly disappear forever. Braver still were those who, determined to be seen and witnessed, showed up publicly with KS lesions (Karposi’s Sarcoma), or with a cane or walker, hobbling around the bar, living in the moment, despite outing themselves as untouchables.
One character, on 196, says poignantly, “‘This disease has magnified all our mistakes.”
I was afraid of reading this book, afraid of what I might see about myself and my own past prejudices against my own community. Makkai writes about the internalized homophobia gay men felt as they swallowed Jesse Helm’s pronouncements that gay men deserved this disease, that it was a judgment by God. It reinforced notions that all gay men were sluts, far from the truth. I, for one, retreated into celibacy for many years as a response to the AIDS crisis and the sexual shame of being a gay man is clearly portrayed in the narrative.
When one of the characters muses about a possible impending HIV diagnosis, he writes about all the things he will miss in a chapter titled July 15, 1986, pages 334-337.
“Lake Michigan, impossibly blue, the morning light bouncing toward the city.”
“Lake Michigan, frozen in sheets you could walk on but wouldn’t dare.”
“Lake Michigan, gray out a high-rise window, indistinguishable from the sky.”
“Bread, hot from the oven. Or even stale in the restaurant basket, rescued by salty butter.”
“The Cubs winning the pennant someday. The Cubs winning the Series.
The Cubs continuing to lose.
“His favorite song, not yet written. His favorite movie, not yet made. . .
“All of them growing old together on the Yacht for Old Queers that Asher always joked about. Right off the Belmont Rocks, he said, with binoculars for everyone.” (334-337).
It continues in a way certain people did not.
All of it poignant and painful to read, yet so essential and healing.