The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai was published in 2018, and voted one of the 10 best books of that year by the New York Times. Now out in paperback, this novel begins in 1985, in Chicago, at a funeral. It is the funeral of Nico, brother of Fiona, and friend to many in the gay community. We meet Yale, an art gallery fundraiser, his partner and journalist, Charlie, and many of their friends.
When I think of 1985 I think of being overwhelmed by the needs of a young family, but it was also the year that saw more people infected with AIDS than any year before. This is the centre of the novel, and the people who are ill, or fear they will become so, and their friends and families. This is also a time just before new drugs that made it possible for many of those with AIDS to live longer than before. It would be some time before ta diagnosis of AIDS was not considered a death sentence, certainly in 1985 anyone testing positive for AIDS did not expect to live long. It was also a time when, though there were gay communities in cities, there were many homosexuals who feared revealing themselves to their families and friends, some who were married while secretly having relationships outside of marriage. The risk involved in casual sex was known, but ignored by so many.
The story then moves to 2015 where we meet Fiona again, now a middle-aged woman, on her way to Paris. She has been estranged from her adult daughter, Claire, but believes that she is in Paris, and that she has a young daughter herself. Fiona is staying with her friend, Richard, a man she has known since she was a teenager. Richard is an artist who has been living in Paris, with his partner, for some years.
As the story alternates between 1985 and 2015, we follow the lives of Yale, his career and the end of his relationship with Charlie, and especially the years that he spends attempting to arrange an exhibition of a particular collection of art. The work involved belongs to an elderly woman, Nora, who lived in Paris before and after the First World War. She was a painter and an artist’s model, accumulating paintings that now have great value. There is a great deal of negotiation involved, and success would make Yale’s reputation. Meanwhile his personal life is falling apart, and more and more of his friends are dying. Nora knows exactly how he feels. She lost so many friends and fellow artists, in the Great War. “Every time I’ve gone to a gallery, the rest of my life, I’ve thought about the works that weren’t there.” Of course, the same could be said of the artists who died from AIDS, as Yale and Richard well know.
In Paris, Fiona is cautiously attempting to make contact with her daughter. She fears she will flee as she did years earlier. This time Fiona will do everything she can to ensure a relationship with her granddaughter. Fiona learns from Richard about the lives of their old friends, friends of her late brother, some who are still alive and living with AIDS, others who are well, and others who have died.
Bit by bit the reader sees the two story lines come together, as we learn the fate of the characters we first met in 1985. There is such regret. The young lives lost. Young men who died too soon to have become uncles, who would never go to their high school reunions. But, as we all know, life does go on, and there are children born who bring a sense of the wonder of life, and there is joy to be found in even the most difficult of times.
I will say that I found some of the content a bit uncomfortable to read, and at the same time The Great Believers was a novel I could not wait to get back to each day, and read too late into the night.