The protagonists of Rebecca Makkai’s terrifyingly sad novel, The Great Believers, Fiona and Yale, are trapped by love and obligation. In 1985, Yale is living through the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Chicago. His friends and dying all around him while he and his lover worry about catching the virus. In 2015, Fiona is tracking down her estranged daughter, who disappeared after leaving a cult. Both of them desperately want to love someone who can’t love them back. The stakes in 2015 are different from those in 1985 and I often wondered why the 2015 chapters were included. It wasn’t until near the end that I saw the echoes and similarities between the two plots make sense. When they did, I was floored by the emotional impact of Yale and Fiona’s story.
Chicago-based Yale believes he and his partner, Charlie, are relatively safe from HIV/AIDS because they’re monogamous. It’s a cold comfort given how many of their friends and former lovers are dying terrible deaths from AIDS-related illnesses. In 1985, before there was any kind of treatment, all they could do was comfort the dying and try to keep themselves safe. Unfortunately, Yale discovers that Charlie has cheated on him and that Charlie has HIV. This should have been a great year for Yale, in spite of everything, since he has just started negotiating the donation of previously unknown art by Amedeo Modigliani, Jeanne Hébuterne, Tsuguharu Foujita, and Chaim Soutine for a new gallery at Northwestern University. This donation could have made his career, but it gets mired in legal fighting at the same time as Yale’s life is falling apart.
Meanwhile, in the Paris of 2015, Fiona is trying to find her daughter Claire. (The Great Believers opens with a funeral for a man named Nico, who is Fiona’s brother.) We slowly learn more about how Fiona took care of so many of her dying friends in Chicago after her brother died. Though she was so caring of others, Claire ran fast and far from Fiona as soon as she could. All Fiona wants (and all Yale wanted) was to be loved by the people they love. For some reason, their love wasn’t enough for Charlie or Claire. Makkai’s characters are not pitiful victims of unrequited love. The more time we spend with them, the more I sympathized with them, hoping that they could learn to let those loves go and find some other happiness.
One of the ideas that comes up several times in The Great Believers struck me hard. The donor of the paintings tells Yale the story of artists who were lost in World War I and the Spanish Flu Epidemic. She leads him to imagine all the life and art that was lost when several of the artists died. She reminds Yale that they were called the Lost Generation, because they were so cut off from what had come before and because some many people had died. Yale is also a member of a Lost Generation: the people who died of AIDS and AIDS-related diseases by the thousands in the 1980s. What might life be like now if they were alive now? What might they have created if they’d lived?
This is a sad book, but it’s also a book about struggle. Yale and his fellow gay men are not going quietly. Towards the end of the book, Yale becomes an actively protesting member of ACT UP. Fiona hires a detective and flies to Europe to find her daughter, just to make sure Claire is safe. It’s also about staying alive longer, claiming your space and defending it; art; who owns what; and much more. It’s a slow book, but it will reward patient readers with a lot of food for thought and a wallop of an ending that blends hope and sorrow.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. It will be released 19 June 2018.