The Great Believers

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers reminded me of a Victorian novel, densely plotted and with a gallery of characters. The subject matter is hardly Victorian, though, it takes us through the mean days of the AIDS crisis.

The book is set in Chicago, not the usual setting for books about gay culture: "Nineteen eighty-one wasn’t too soon to get infected, not by a long shot, but then this wasn’t San Francisco, it wasn’t New York. Things, thank God, moved slower here." We follow two different plot threads, that of Yale Tishman, fairly new to the city, with a job at an art gallery at Northwestern. This thread begins with the memorial service for Yale's friend Nico, who has just succumbed to AIDS. The year is 1985.

The second thread follows Nico's sister, Fiona. In her youth she was something of a mother figure to Nico's friends, hardly having time to make a life for herself. In her section she is fifty years old, the year is 2015, and she is in Paris to try to find her estranged daughter.

The book has an omniscient narrator, but the two stories follow Yale and Fiona--there are no scenes without them. Yale is keen on getting a donation of art from an old woman, Fiona's great-aunt, who lived during the heady days of post-World War I Paris. She has a trove of art from the likes of Modigliani, but insists that an unknown artist, Ranko Novak (who seems to be fictional) be included in the exhibition.

Yale is also, like many gay men of the time, walking through the landmine field of AIDS. Many gay men of that era spent a lot of time at funerals. Yale is monogamous with his boyfriend Charlie, the publisher of a gay newspaper, an advocate for condoms. But of course, all men, gay or straight, may exhibit a weakness. "Everyone got it from someone. We all got it from Reagan, right? We’re gonna blame someone, let’s be productive and blame the ignorance and neglect of Ronald Fucking Reagan. Let’s blame Jesse Helms. How about the Pope?"

I enjoyed the book, but it seemed to take forever to finish. It only has 431 pages, but I felt like I was reading it for a year. As with any good Victorian novelist, Makkai fills the book with wonderful lines, like: "The kind of woman who seemed made entirely of scarves," or "The whole bar looked to him like a petri dish." My favorite sentence: "Yale had meant to knock the side of his head into the window, but since the window was down, his head flopped out into the rushing air." But the book is over-stuffed, a meal too rich by half.

The book is full of anger, as well. I knew several gay men during that time, and Silence = Death was not a lightly taken phrase. The climax of the Yale section is a march against the sluggish response of the medical establishment: "When was the last time he’d yelled? He’d yelled at Cubs games. He’d yelled at Charlie when they were breaking up. But he hadn’t yelled about AIDS. He hadn’t yelled at the government. He hadn’t yelled at the forces that had denied Katsu Tatami health insurance, at the county hospital system that had made Katsu wait two weeks for a bed when he couldn’t breathe and then let him die on a ward that smelled like piss. He hadn’t yelled yet at this new mayor and his lip service. He hadn’t yelled at the universe."

The 1980s section is far longer than the 2015 section, and is much more powerful, almost making the latter superfluous. As we follow Fiona in Paris we wonder what will happen to Yale, and when it does, though expected, it breaks our hearts. What is it like to expect a death sentence, and then to get one? Yale visits a friend in the AIDS ward and realizes he is looking at the place he will die. Small details are measured out by the time left: "In the living room was the best stereo system Yale had ever used, and a shelf of classical CDs and opera and Broadway and Sinatra. Left to his own devices, he’d have been listening to The Smiths, which wouldn’t have helped a thing; and if it turned out he only had a few years to live, shouldn’t he be listening to Beethoven?"