After the plague

Rebecca Makkai’s compulsively readable third novel and fourth book of fiction, “The Great Believers,” opens aptly, with a funeral, in the Chicago of 1985 — when AIDS was still badly understood, ineffectively treated and raging out of control, terrorizing gay communities. There we meet young art gallery development director Yale Tishman, and his inscrutable lover, Charlie, who runs a feisty alternative newsweekly. Both young men are caught up in the gay rights politics of the time, and with their own careers: In Yale’s case, worrying about the spread of the mysterious virus, while trying to secure a prize stash of invaluable paintings from an ailing old woman who once modeled for a passel of bigname artists, including Modigliani and Soutine. “Lately [Yale had] had two parallel mental lists going — the donor list and the sick list. The people who might donate art or money, and the friends who might get sick ... and the friends he’d already lost.”

Yale’s and Charlie’s beloved friend Nico, among the earliest of the disease’s victims, is the funeral’s honoree. Nico’s younger sister, Fiona, age 20 at the time, is also on hand, closely woven into the network of grieving men and women who savor the kinds of tribal intensity, The radio operator didn’t like me. defiant flamboyance and intramural affairs that happen during people’s 20s and 30s — a fleeting, bittersweet belonging many readers will recognize, and for which we can feel a visceral nostalgia.

But “Believers” doubles its ambition by alternately layering in two stories: that of the above era and that of 2015, in which the now-divorced Fiona, 50-something charity-boutique owner, mother of a grown daughter who’s disappeared — possibly with a toddling daughter of her own — is flying to Paris, where she’s hired a P.I. to help her find her daughter.

Slowly, in both time frames, the lens homes in: on larger, tangled circumstances; on the paths of linked, vivid characters in the gay network of the ’80s and ’90s (“Boystown”), on signal events (protest marches in ’80s Chicago; the Paris massacre of 2015) and the ways earnest lives unfold. The reader quickly grows comfortable inhabiting two worlds 30 years apart, and a piquant energy is kicked up by the contrasts: how the evolutions of one era’s ensemble shaped those of a later one. All the players in “Believers” figure boldly, but in Fiona and especially in Yale, Makkai has given us two warmly dimensional, passionate souls who strive, in moving ways, to live as fully as their imaginations (and harsh circumstances) may allow.

And speaking of energy: Makkai’s feels busily Dickensian, her prose a relentless engine mowing back and forth across decades, zooming in on subtlest physical and emotional nuances of dozens of characters, missing no chance to remind us what’s at stake — during the catastrophic AIDS crisis, in the power-struggle to acquire important art worth millions (which, disastrously, might be forged), and latterly as terrorism begins making routine claims on daily realities.

In 1985, “Guys with families flew home for Thanksgiving to play straight for nieces and nephews, to assure their grandparents they were dating, no one special, a few nice girls. To assure their fathers, who had cornered them in various garages and hallways, that no, they weren’t going to catch this new disease.”

Whereas in 2015, notes a young French friend, “No one in France is an optimist.” At the same time, Fiona muses, Paris “was simply a city that talked about love, that acknowledged its constant invasions, its messiness.” And in fact, alongside searching for her estranged daughter and granddaughter, hooking up (for stress relief ) with an amicable young writer, and catching up with some still-living members of Boystown — Fiona spends most of her Paris time thinking about the ’80s and ’90s, in grief and perplexity: “So incredibly, impossibly young. Had anyone ever been that young?”

Makkai allows Yale and Fiona their excruciating insights, and these feel earned. When Yale, who by this point is losing friends and lovers rapidly, watches his romantic young assistant absorbing the madness-drenched history of the paintings they’re trying to acquire, he reflects wryly: “How beautiful [to the vulnerable young], the doomed love! How gorgeous and ambient, the ways we abandon each other! The lovely wars we die in, the poetry of disease!” And when Yale himself falls ill, “[M]ore and more ... he thought of people ... not as the sum of all the disappointments, but as every beginning they’d ever represented, every promise.”

Almost buried toward the novel’s end is a heart-spearing line from “Hamlet,” uttered by the play’s dying hero to Horatio: “In this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story.”

“What a burden,” laments surviving Boystown member Julian, who quotes the line, in 2015. “To be Horatio. To be the one with the memory. And what’s Horatio supposed to do with it?” With “The Great Believers,” Makkai has offered one answer.

Joan Frank’s latest novel is “All the News I Need,” winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction. Email: books@sfchronicle.com