During my reading of Rebecca Makkai’s third novel The Great Believers, a feature by Corey Kilgannon ran in The New York Times titled “Shunned In Life, Forgotten in Death.” In 1985, the bodies of 17 victims of AIDS arrived for mass burial at Hart Island in Long Island Sound. Scores of stigmatized others followed to be interred in quarantined trenches. The story’s purpose is to acknowledge and remember – and it also reminded me of David Rieff’s provocative book In Praise of Forgetting (Yale, 2016). Rieff questioned the value of “collective memory” as a measure of a society’s moral consciousness and asked: “What if the past can provide no satisfactory meaning, no matter how generously or inclusively it is interpreted?”
Kilgannon’s journalistic facts grate against that question and underscore the mission of remembrance. But The Great Believers, a novel about the AIDS catastrophe and its aftermath, elevates the anxiety triggered by such a question. Although Makkai movingly informs us about an historic moment, especially for those readers who cannot recall the griefs in the first place, its prime purpose is not to teach or memorialize. This novel is about the moment of its telling, which is our moment – a persistence through discouragement, an aching unresponsive to standard therapy, a speaking that hovers over its dark impulse, and a regard for relief as a long but stubborn reach.
The novel tells two related stories through alternating chapters. The first, occurring mainly in the mid 1980s, follows the lives and several of the deaths of a group of gay men in Chicago. The unnamed narrator fixes attention on Yale Tishman, an impressionable and earnest 31-year old man who lives with his partner Charlie Keene, a community leader and publisher of a magazine of gay culture. At the outset, they are headed to a gathering to honor Nico Marcus who had died three weeks previously of AIDS. The event’s host is Richard Blanco, a photographer. The second story takes place in Paris in 2015 as Fiona Marcus, Nico’s 51-year old sister, arrives in search of her estranged daughter Claire who had been swept up in a cult
The Great Believers tightens its lens on immediate relations among articulate, spirited people who, in the novel’s 80’s sequences, are being stalked by an unstoppable enemy. The dread comes in spasms. In the later sequences, a singular notion dominates, namely that the emotional damage of the earlier decades is not repairable for Fiona. She finds Richard Blanco in Paris; his show, just about to open, comprises images of those who had succumbed in Chicago. Two questions weigh on the reader: Will Yale Tishman survive the dangers that are taking down his close friends? Will Fiona Marcus find her daughter and arrive at a reconciliation?
Just at the few instances when the novel’s pulse seems to weaken, Makkai delivers a crucial turn. This is a novel of dialogue, daily movement, and scrutinized motions, and Makkai takes the risk of demanding patience. In effect, she wants us to become infected with the quality of strung-out time itself while threatening hazards loom. For this reason, she sets Yale off on a subplot. Working for the development office of Northwestern University’s museum, he attempts to reel in a group of highly valuable artworks from a potential donor. We stick with him, calculating the odds for his successful livelihood since we can’t assess the grim odds against his life. We stick with Fiona as well, though once again her chances for resolution seem slim. The slimness of chance becomes the reader’s own fate.
Makkai’s third-person narrator is the one who remembers the betrayals, desperation, and hopes in detail. For all the breadth of vision, this is a delicately tricky invention. In a sense, she has constructed a version of the “collective memory” mentioned above, assembled through her research – she was seven years old in 1985. Every catastrophe ultimately gets its passion play and “never forget” becomes the logo for redemption. The Great Believers certainly eulogizes its dead, those bright young people shunned by their own families. But art does not succeed by compelling you to like it or to promise your salvation. It succeeds by making you feel the presence in it. The presence in The Great Believers, equipped as it is to commemorate, is the voice and mind of the sinister present.
[Published by Viking on June 19, 2018. 421 pages, $27.00 hardcover]