Novel that visits AIDs era re-creates history just right
It’s an odd sensation when you’ve lived long enough for the years of your youth to become historicalfiction fodder for younger writers.
A few years ago, Garth Risk Hallberg’s sprawling novel, “City on Fire,” tried to re-create late 1970s New York City on the page. Some critics loved it, but I kept tripping up on false notes and anachronisms that repeatedly yanked me out of its narrative.
There’s no such problem with Rebecca Makkai’s magnificent third novel, “The Great Believers.” As it alternates between an AIDS-stricken circle of friends in mid-1980s Chicago and a handful of straight and gay survivors in 2015 Paris, it doesn’t set a foot wrong.
My question: How the hell did she do it?
Archives research and oral histories can take you only so far. Some unquantifiable alchemy is needed too — and Makkai, born in 1978, has it.
In “The Great Believers,” she brings a whole era back into view. She’s aware that Big Public Events — the ones that make it into history books — are often mere background noise to those living through them. The Zeitgeist, when it’s on your radar at all, is seen through a haze of tensions with your family, uncertainty about your boyfriend, excitement about a project at work and plans to have drinks with a friend. Things don’t go in a straight line. Vital information arrives in dribs and drabs, often when your attention is elsewhere.
The book’s 1985 narrative opens with a memorial celebration of Nico Marcus, the first to die of AIDS in a tight-knit circle of friends connected by their activities in the arts. Yale Tishman, freshly hired for a prestigious art gallery job, and his English boyfriend Charlie Keene, editor of Out Loud Chicago, attend the fancy affair at photographer Richard Campo’s house. So does Nico’s younger sister, Fiona, who became his caretaker when the rest of his family abandoned him. They’re straining hard for a festive note, but it’s tough to pull off.
This dazzling first chapter ends with a twist that triggers a misunderstanding between Yale and Charlie that keeps compounding itself, setting the tone for the whole book.
In the 2015 narrative, the focus is on Fiona and she’s in wry disarray. She’s divorced. She’s estranged from her daughter Claire. She may or may not be a grandmother. Her trip to Paris isn’t for fun but to see if she can track down Claire, who has been incommunicado for years. She stays with Campo, now a celebrity about to have a career retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. The tone of these events 30 years after Nico’s death is one of anxious comedy.
Gay subject matter isn’t new to Makkai. Her first novel, “The Borrower,” was a madcap tale about a small-town librarian trying to rescue a 10-year-old boy whose evangelical parents, in a pre-emptive move, are forcing him to attend a gay-conversion camp. Where “The Borrower” was small in scale, however, “The Great Believers” is symphonic. Along with its 1985 and 2015 narratives, it delves deeply into the Paris of the 1910s and 1920s.
That’s because Yale’s big gallery project in 1985 is the acquisition of a collection of early-20th-century drawings and paintings belonging to Nora Marcus Lerner, acquired in Paris while she was modeling for Modigliani, Soutine and others. Nora’s family isn’t happy with her decision to donate the collection, and Yale’s navigation of this tricky situation proves a lively distraction from the AIDS nightmare unfolding around him.
In the novel, as in life, a whole tangle of things is happening at once. For this circle of friends, the entire city of Chicago may be “turning into lesions and echoing coughs and the ropy fossils of limbs,” but they gamely try to continue with their lives while waiting for their blood-test results.
Makkai has full command of her multigenerational perspective, and by its end, “The Great Believers” offers a grand fusion of the past and the present, the public and the personal. It’s remarkably alive despite all the loss it encompasses.
Novelist Michael Upchurch (“Passive Intruder”) is the former Seattle Times book critic.