RaveLambda LiteraryThe Great Believers shifts between two narratives and time periods as it chronicles the AIDS epidemic in Chicago during the 1980s. The first explores Yale’s life in the 1980s where he lives with his partner, Charlie Keene, editor and founder of the gay newspaper Out Loud; a life where attending the funerals of their friends has become disturbingly normal. The second narrative details the life of Fiona (Nico’s sister) in 2015, where she lives with the traumas and wounds of the epidemic that claimed her brother and many close friends … Fiona’s narrative provides a well-rendered contrast and complement to the stories and problems that arise in Yale’s narrative. The two storylines work together like a duet, a call-and-response song, where an issue rises in one and can concludes in the other … Makkai wonderfully depicts all the different iterations of doomed love, demonstrating the ways in which love can be destructive, the ways it can permanently scar. For Yale love has jeopardized his health; and he sometimes feels as though the entire community is being punished for practicing love on their own terms … Fiona’s divorce and her antipathy towards it derives from a manufactured and entrenched guilt. Her love is not legislated or reproached in the same ways her friend’s and brother’s loves are—if no one in her life was allowed a blissful, unblemished love life, how could she have it? With what right can she? As thus her attempts are also doomed.
