a must read about love, loss and resilience
Rebecca Makkai’s novel The Great Believers is both a tragedy and a love letter. While it is able to bring across the vibrancy of the queer community, it also shows how this light is dimmed by the beginning of the AIDS epidemic – and how the aftermath still has an impact on people who lived during those times. Reading this piece of art left me speechless and deeply moved.
But before I dive into why this novel had the effect on me that it had, here is a little summary of the content. The Great Believers, published in 2018, is a fictional book that has two storylines. The first one occurring in the 1980s to early ’90s. Yale Tishman is a young art gallery acquisition manager living in Chicago, more specifically in Boystown. While he tries to make a career breakthrough, the AIDS epidemic around him starts to spread and becomes a more and more prominent factor in his life. The second timeline is in 2015 and follows Fiona Marcus. She is searching for her daughter in Paris that cut ties with her a couple of years ago and is simultaneously dealing with the trauma the AIDS epidemic has left behind.
To understand the importance and gravity of Yale’s story, it helps to know what Chicago, or the USA per se, looked like in the 1980s in a more general context. Unfortunately, the backdrop of this book is not just fiction – it was a bitter reality for a lot of people. AIDS was officially recognized in 1981, even though it was present in the USA since the late ’70s. During that time, the disease was mostly reported among gay men, but began to affect people who injected drugs or received contaminated blood transfusions nationwide shortly after. During the ’80s and ’90s tens of thousands of Americans died each year. What Makkai was able to achieve, is showing those moments of loss and fear, but also the simultaneous resilience and solidarity of the Boystown community. Through Yale and Fiona, we see those statistics form into real people, friends and family, struggling going through those times and that is what makes the story so incredibly moving and powerful.
It shows how Yale and all his friends are struggling every day; not necessarily because they are ill, but because they are scared to be the next one or one of their friends might be. It shows how much the mental health of people was affected by the rapid spread of the disease. We see the world through Yale’s eyes and hence, get rid of the stigma, that only people with a lot of different partners were infected. It shows that this is a virus spreading wildly and people being terrified and helpless; just like some of us might’ve felt during the COVID-19 pandemic. This book doesn’t sugarcoat anything and it might be to no one’s surprise that the ending is not a typical Happy End everyone secretly wished for. Apart from that stigma, the author also portrays how much the LGBTQ community fought for their rights for better health insurance and the chance to keep their jobs despite being infected. Even though Makkai created fictional characters, the events occurring did, in fact, happen, which shows the seriousness of the situation 40 years ago.
But not only the past has one captured in the urgency of the epidemic’s peak. The time line jumps to 2015 and Fiona reminds us, that the trauma is still present decades later and the pain has not diminished quite yet. She already plays a role in the ’80s and is introduced as one of the sisters of a gay friend of Yale. Her life in 2015 is not only about finding and connecting with her lost daughter but how this relationship is impacted by the trauma she carries from this difficult past. It shows that not only people that had HIV or AIDS are victims of the time, but their relatives and loved ones too – and how they struggle with the loss of the people that have left them. The characters have a lot of depth and are easy to relate to (as far as it goes). It is not a fast-paced book and leads you gently into the whole problematic situation. The author doesn’t introduce too many characters, which makes it easy to follow.
“But when someone’s gone and you’re the primary keeper of his memory—letting go would be a kind of murder, wouldn’t it? I had so much love for him, even if it was a complicated love, and where is all that love supposed to go? He was gone, so it couldn’t change, it couldn’t turn to indifference. I was stuck with all that love.”
Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers
In conclusion, The Great Believers is not just a novel about grief and loss – it’s an expression of memory and love that refuses to fade. It left me in tears and deeply moved. Makkai was able to capture the lives and voices that should not be forgotten.