"The Great Believers," by Rebecca Makkai

Reading “The Great Believers” (Viking, 2018), by Rebecca Makkai (whose novel “The Hundred-Year House” I wrote about here on 8/31/14) takes us back to the time when the initial scourge of AIDS suddenly devastated whole communities, mostly of gay men, in the early 1980s and beyond. The novel is mainly set in New York; as a San Franciscan, I remember very clearly that the disease rampaged through this city as well. Half of this novel focuses on a group of friends in New York, gay men, mostly in creative careers related to the arts, who one by one are dying of AIDS. (This was before any of the current life-prolonging treatments were discovered.) The novel portrays this catastrophic time, and the emotional and social as well as physical damage and suffering that took place, well and even graphically. The other half of the novel (the two halves are presented in alternating sections) takes place thirty years later, when Fiona, whose brother and many friends were among the victims of the disease, and who was a main character in the first half of the novel, now goes to Paris to look for her daughter, who has become part of a cult. The two stories weave back and forth, and there are some happy memories and happy times despite and even amidst the nightmare of the AIDS disaster. There are a few subordinate but related plot lines, one related to the main character, Yale, as he tries to acquire a hitherto unknown art collection from a dying woman who had known and posed for many famous artists in Paris in the early twentieth century. Although the main topic of this novel is obviously incredibly painful and sad, the novel is much more multilayered and complex than one might think when reading the above description. This is a compelling and important novel, and I highly recommend it to you.