In The Great Believers, Makkai tells two stories separated by decades. The first takes place in the early eighties and follows Yale, a young gay man who’s hot on the heels of what he believes will be a great art acquisition for the small gallery where he works; the AIDS crisis is just beginning. The second takes place in not-quite-present-day, 2015, I think and follows a minor character from Yale’s story, Fiona, as she journeys to Paris to try to reconnect with her estranged daughter. You can’t accuse Makkai of lacking ambition and she does a really good job creating a really large ensemble of characters and making a lot of them come surprisingly to life. Some of the most memorable characters, like the rakish Julian, the canny private detective Arnaud, or the emotionally battered Debra are hardly in the book, but they’re striking and interesting. Yale’s story was more interesting to me than Fiona’s, maybe because I’m into art and not a mother, I don’t know. Still it has the larger backdrop of AIDS sweeping through Yale’s world, infecting, crippling and killing indiscriminately and the emotion of Yale’s story is strong and painful. The book is often really sad and there are some scenes in Yale’s section of the book that will stay with me for years I think. Makkai’s prose is really, really sharp and despite the fact that the book is nearly 450 pages and those pages are packed with text, it doesn’t feel particularly long because of what an easy read it is, just in terms of feeling really energetic and compelling. The book could maybe stand a few revisions. The 1980s plot, for me, so overwhelms the 2015 plot that it made me wish the book had been more of 60-40 or even 70-30 split between the two instead of the 50-50 split between the two plots that it is. Ultimately, this is probably personal; I’m sure there are people out there who found the modern plot more compelling than the past one. Regardless of that, Makkai has fashioned a really fine novel with great characters, wonderful prose and it’s definitely very evocative and empathetic. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – novel about the emotional fallout of the AIDS crisis works better in some parts than others, but it’s ultimately a really well-written novel with empathetic and complex characters. 3 ½ stars.