Thomas's Reviews > The Great Believers

A good read that threads two timelines together: one follows a group of gay male friends affected by the AIDS epidemic in 1980s Chicago, the second centers Fiona, a mother searching for her estranged daughter in 2015. Fiona’s brother, a member of that gay group of friends, died as part of the AIDS epidemic and Fiona has carried the grief of his death and the deaths of his friends all her life. Despite its meandering pace, The Great Believers serves as a powerful story about AIDS and how it devastated the lives of gay men and those who cared about them.

I found Yale and his friends’ perspectives the most compelling throughout the novel. As a gay man who has grown up in an era with more preventative care, treatment options, and overall awareness of HIV and AIDS, sometimes I take for granted the work of the activists who came before me to make my life so much more bearable. Rebecca Makkai does a great job of capturing the consequences of the administration that ignored queer people’s need for healthcare and as a result buried many of us alive. Instead of presenting a one-sided image of these gay men, she imbues their relationships with complexity. I appreciated the snippets of Yale’s emotional experiences, like his heartbreak and anger at Charlie, his neediness and insecurity that manifested with Roman, as well as that relationship that could have almost been with another character at the end of the book. I most loved the quiet, consistent solidarity between him and Fiona, the power of their friendship throughout so many much suffering and death. As someone who’s estranged from my parents for the most part, I connected a lot with Yale’s reliance and closeness with his friends, his chosen family.

As much as I admired Fiona as a compassionate friend and a three-dimensional character, I felt that her storyline in 2015 did detract from the pacing and power of the 1980s plot. On one hand, not including her 2015 perspective may have made the novel more appropriative, as Makkai identifies as straight. I also feel unsure about whether Yale’s perspective could have carried the whole weight of a novel on its own, even though I liked Yale a lot. On the other hand, Fiona’s whole conflict with her daughter felt secondary and almost unnecessary compared to Yale’s point of view. This issue of pacing and delivery of the story made me feel more lukewarm on The Great Believers on the whole.

Still, a decent read that I hope paves the way for more queer books, especially books written by actual queer people, in particular queer people of color and those at the margins of the queer community. For more adult fiction queer reads, I’d recommend The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihiara, and The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara.