The Great Believers: Devastating and Beautiful account of 1980s AIDS Crisis

It's often dangerous to read a too hyped book, the fear being that the clamour among critics, award juries, and other readers sets the expectations way too high. Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers, a recounting of the AIDS crisis in 1980s Chicago certainly brought the hype. Starred reviews from Kirkus and Publisher's Weekly, shortlisted for the National Book Award and the Carnegie Medal in Fiction and certain to make dozens of year end lists for best book of the year and is a favourite to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction next April. Despite the praise, I'd put off picking it up until the time was right, and it certainly was when I finally did a few days ago. Makkai has delivered a heart wrenching account of what she describes as a war, with the casualties of the crisis scarring the survivors with emotional wounds that never will completely heal.

The story is told through the eyes of two protagonist in two time periods. The first being Yale, a thirty-something gay art gallery procurer recounting his life from the mid 1980s just after the death of a close friend, Nico, up until the early 1990s. Dealing with the emotional turbulence of death surrounding him, the constant paranoia of becoming infected, and surviving a political and cultural environment keen to dispose of him and his friends, Yale's story is an intimate depiction of someone eager for stability, for love, and some professional success, all things we all take for granted but for Yale things so hard to attain because of the AIDS epidemic. Yale's sections are emotional juggernaughts, providing us an insight into a war zone that Yale has to navigate through, with others but often alone.

The second storyline takes place in 2015, following a fifty-year old Fiona, Nico's younger sister who remained loyal to her brother when her parents exiled him and chose Nico's friends as her family after his death. Thirty years later, she is in search of her long estranged daughter and ends up in Paris reconnecting with old friends and the community she stood by during the bleakest periods of the 1980s. While trying to figure out what went wrong with the relationship with her daughter, Fiona must face up to the impact the death that filled her youth had on who she was and how she related to those she cared deeply for. Some have suggested that her storyline is less powerful than Yale's, but I found it both necessary (allowing the reader to catch their breath, Fiona's timeline giving us some distance from the harshest and saddest moments of the story) but also a valuable perspective of those who embraced allyship during the 1980s and investigating the toll that brought with it.

Filled with discussions of art, love, friendship, sexuality and with a  darkly sentimental reverence for a place and time that left so much carnage behind, Makkai delivers an emotionally devastating novel that while hard at times to take in, reads beautifully and fills the reader with the sense of loss that so many experienced during the period. Makkai delivers a book that is meticulously researched and is a worthy companion to other works of art and non-fiction that form the canon of gay and AIDS related depictions of the 1980s crisis.

One additional point I do want to bring up is the issue of allyship versus appropriation, that Makkai herself brings up in her acknowledgment. A few years ago, author Lionel Shriver launched a discussion about cultural appropriation, suggesting that writers were no longer allowed to write characters that shared their identities and that this amounted to censorship. She was, somewhat dishonestly, responding to legitimate criticisms of her book, The Mandibles, and racist tropes she resorted to in depicting African American characters. Most retorted (here and here) Shriver, noting that of course authors are able to write characters that did not share their identities or experiences, but when one does so writers must do their homework, research, be respectful and cognizant that you are voicing an experience and a story that is not yours.

In many ways, The Great Believers is an example of doing this right.  Makkai is a straight woman who is too young to have been in the middle of the crises. Yet she engaged in years of research, numerous interviews of those who were there, and used these first hand sources as readers to assure an authenticity to the story. The product speaks for itself, and shows what authors can do rather than repeat Shriver's dishonest laziness and faux outrage.

Anyways, this was a spectacular book and merits all the praise it has received. Hopefully with some award attention it will get the readership it deserves.