Makkai is very good at conjuring a gay community enacting the usual dramas of love and lust and ambition and jealousy in a world where all the usual dramas suddenly can carry a fatal charge where to be spared makes one “the luckiest man to stand there at the end of it all … the one left, trying to remember. “Your mama took care of us all,” one of the circle’s rare survivors tells Claire, and there is a suggestion that this despairing care displaced a daughter born in grief. For Fiona, who disowned her parents when they disowned Nico, the notion of family is as tricky and difficult as it is for the circle of gay men around her and Yale. The story alternates between Yale’s perspective in the mid-1980s and Fiona’s 30 years later as she searches for her estranged daughter Claire in Paris.
In Rebecca Makkai’s “The Great Believers,” the disaster is the inexorable unfolding of the AIDS crisis in Chicago as experienced by two characters in the thick of it: Yale, a young gay man whose friends are dying one by one and Fiona, the younger sister of one of those friends, Nico, whose after-funeral party opens the book.
Most disasters can’t be deeply understood, really felt, without a ground-level guide, and so it is with catastrophic events portrayed in novels - one character’s experience summons empathy in a way that statistics, however horrific, can’t.
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