“The Great Believers” - Rebecca Makkai

 

This book. If it’s on your TBR, move it to the top of the stack. If it’s not on your TBR, it should be! 

Makkai brings into sharp focus the terror of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, the generation of young men wiped out by a virus, and the trauma of survivors, explored on a multi-generational level. Her narrative style is disarming. TBR is sly and hopeful. Her portrayals are gritty yet darkly humorous in places. IMO Makkai does not succumb to overdone, melodramatic writing, though the subject matter is painful.

Makkai captures the atmosphere among a gay intelligentsia - men of certain promise who, having just found pockets of freedom among chosen family (she writes of young men finding a space where they could feel “entitled to joy”), must face down an early death. She includes the petty squabbles, dramas, and assorted minutiae of daily life, but with a deep undercurrent of death and terror.

I think TGB reminds our generation and future generations of the truths of living while dying in the center of the AIDS epidemic. I think Makkai is careful not to cross the line from allyship to appropriation. Obviously, readers will recognize that she is writing retrospectively, and that her fictional account is not based on her lived experiences. I found the details about her primary source research fascinating. The AIDS epidemic was not just a dramatic backdrop for this story; it was the story.

TGB hops back and forth in time, from as far back at World War I-era Paris, to 1980s Chicago, to the early ‘00s. In 1985, between the existential Cold War threat, and losing loved ones and friends to a little-understood, silent killer, and the constant threat of police threats and the attacks of bigots, gay communities existed within a pressure cooker. TGB forces us to reckon with what gay men in the 1980s were forced to endure: the heartbreak-upon-heartbreak. As if all of the above weren’t enough, the suffering was compounded by families disowning their children, or denying entry to gay partners during their loved one’s final moments.

In the 1980s battle against the epidemic, Makkai’s characters living it, speak of the epidemic as a function of safe sex and shame. I was intrigued by the demographic of gay men vehemently opposed to HIV testing when no cure was available. They reasoned that the testing would just encourage reckless behavior rather than promote safe sex. If there was no cure, what was the point of knowing, other than possibly being included in some shady government database? The mistrust of a government that was too reluctant to join the fight, was real and palpable. I thought that Makkai fleshed out this group of men compassionately. We now know what we know, but if you were living in the eye of the storm, how would you react? If the government was telling you quite clearly that your life was expendable, what would you do?

Makkai’s tie-in to WWI-era Paris, was poetic. The gay men of the 1980s were a new “Lost Generation” - as Fitzgerald had dubbed the post-WWI generation. The loss, then, is not just the scores killed in battle or by a virus, it is their peers who survived with life-altering injuries or mental horrors. Yale is representative of the new Lost Generation. And Fiona’s relationship with Claire is emblematic of survivor trauma carried long after the crisis was over.

TGB read to my mind like Makkai captured some of the truth lived by this generation of young men, and their lovers, caretakers, and chosen family. It could have been a dangerously cloying portrayal, but I feel that Makkai avoided that. I think she does her best to honor the memories of those lost to AIDS, and to tell their stories. Makkai doesn’t uncover some startling new truths about the crisis, but her retelling of stories let’s us come away profoundly thinking about what it might have been like to endure, to really consider the facts as we’ve known them, from a more elemental level. For this generation of men, the act of living, was revolutionary.