THE MEMORY LIVES ON (Book Review of The Great Believers)

An important book. That’s how I’d initially regarded Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers (Viking, 2018). I knew from skimming a review that it was a novel about AIDS, after all. But that hadn’t been enough. If it had come out in 1990, I’d have devoured it, just as I’d worked my way through Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On, sobbing at many spots, getting riled up at many more. But the urgency has long faded, at least here in North America. Maybe that’s why I only made it through the first twenty pages when I checked this book out from the library last year. I stumbled across the title again when I was in Stockholm this fall and jotted down the name, having forgotten that I’d abandoned the book once already. Thank god for memory lapses. This time around, the important book quickly evolved into a compelling, entertaining read.

The story begins in Chicago in 1985 at a makeshift memorial for Nico who has just died from complications from AIDS, his gay lover and friends excluded from the official family funeral held twenty miles away. Nico’s feisty twenty-one-year-old sister, Fiona, has boycotted the funeral, opting to be with loved ones who never shunned him. Chapters alternate between 1985 Chicago (and the years thereafter), told from the perspective of Nico’s dear friend Yale, and 2015 Paris where Fiona is trying to locate her adult daughter, with whom there has been no communication for three years. Parts of the story go back to pre- and post- World War I as well, since 1980s Yale, in his new position working for a fledgling art gallery at Northwestern University, has to make trips to Madison, Wisconsin to meet up with Fiona’s great-aunt, Nora, who may or may not have a significant art collection to bequeath from her time in the thick of the Parisian art scene, connecting with greats like Amedeo Modigliani and Tsuguharu Foujita.

The story is about profound loss and how to keep alive the memory of loved ones who died in what should have been the prime of life. Just as aging Nora is still driven by a passionate love affair from more than sixty years ago, Fiona finds her life forever impacted by her deceased brother and his gay community of friends. Indeed, in an excerpt from a 2015 chapter: “They weren’t all dead. Not all of them. On October 13 she’d held her own quiet memorial, alone in her house, for Nico. Candles and music and too much wine. Thirty years. How could it possibly have been thirty years? But that was just the start of the worst time, when the entire city she’d known was turning into lesions and echoing coughs and ropy fossils of limbs.”

Often, in reading this book, I ached right alongside Fiona. The book is so well-researched, the events of the AIDS crisis so realistically told, that my own friends and acquaintances—Stephen and Don and Farrell and Jose—came vividly back to life as well, frozen in time at twenty-eight and thirty-two. Knowing how prognoses began to change beginning around 1995, The Great Believers brings back heartache and a rueful, devastating series of If Onlys. Quoting from the same page: “She had so much guilt about so many of them—the ones she wished she’d talked into getting tested sooner, the ones she might have gone back in time to keep from going out on a particular night…, the ones she might have done more for when they got sick.”

The plots about the possibly valuable art donation and Fiona’s missing daughter are told well enough, but the heart of the novel involves how the AIDS crisis impacted one particular social circle in 1980s Chicago. The accounts of decisions to get tested (or not), of fretting over the results in what was then a tortuously long two-week wait period, of hospital visits, of rapid declines witnessed on the street or in bars, of debates about bathhouses and of rising civil disobedience vividly convey the time. For me personally, I was still closeted back then, my awareness of AIDS developments coming solely from news sources (and, yes, Shilts’ magnificent tome). The Great Believers masterfully adds flesh to the facts that I knew. This work of fiction makes things real.

Given the subject matter, there were scenes that I struggled to get through and I had to put the book aside one night, angry with a plot decision Makkai made. It was silly. She was keeping things brutally real; I was fighting for some trace of fairy tale. Happily ever afters had no place in that time. Didn’t we think it was only a matter of time before AIDS got us all?

For more than a generation now, there have been happier fates, endings postponed indefinitely. That means that a large portion of the LGBTQ community has no personal knowledge of such a darker time, one which also gave rise to more political activism leading to so many of the changes we see happening today. AIDS was our war. The Great Believers is a powerful book to help us remember, to help others understand. An important book, yes, but also one that is so very well told.