Book Report: The Great Believers

9. Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers (2018) (4/6/23)

I started following Rebecca Makkai's newsletter Submakk recently, though I'd never read any of her work—so I figured I should change that. As luck would have it, I owned this novel from 2018, a finalist for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. So I dove in.

And yes, was immediately hooked. Set alternately in the early 1980s in Chicago at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and in 2015 in Paris, it tells, mainly, the stories of two characters, Yale Tishman, a young gay man who works as development director at the Northwestern University art gallery, and, in the later story, Fiona Marcus, a friend of Yale's and the sister of another young man, Nico, who has just died as the story opens. Fiona is in Paris trying to find and reconcile with her estranged daughter, Claire.

I found the characters utterly believable in their confused, vulnerable, often contradictory ways of approaching the world, living outside conventional society to a degree but with all the dreams and hopes of any human being. It is a very honest book, authentic to a time and an experience we don't hear much about. It's also an emotional book, in a good way: fully felt.

There are those readers on Goodreads who complain about the two-story-line structure, but I felt it added an important dimension to the book, which is to a great degree about loss and grief and memory—and how we who survive carry the lives of the disappeared with us as we go forward. I also enjoyed the theme of art, which is used to good ends, especially at the finish, where we attend a photographic and video exhibition by Richard Campo, who spans both time frames, and see the earlier world in retrospect. It also plays into a subplot involving bohemian artists from the WWI era—another time of senseless death.

Makkai is a wonderful writer: I thoroughly enjoyed sinking into her beautiful prose. Here are a couple bits I flagged:

Here, Yale is speaking with the very old woman, Fiona's great-aunt Nora, who wishes to donate some old drawings to his gallery—Modigliani, Soutine, Foujita, and one unknown artist, whom Nora was in love with. As soon as she met him, she said, 

"I wanted to paint him, that was my first thought, but the next instant I was smitten. I'd never understood it before, how artists fall for their muses. I thought it was just a bunch of men who couldn't keep it in their pants. But there was something about the need to paint him and the need to possess him—they were the same impulse. I don't know if that makes sense, but there it was."
     Yale tried to say something, but didn't know how to begin. It had to do with a walk he once took with Nico and Richard around the Lincoln Park Lagoon, the two of them sharing Richard's Leica. It struck Yale that day how they both had a way of interacting with the world that was simultaneously selfish and generous–grabbing at beauty and reflecting beauty back. The benches and fire hydrants and manhole covers Nico and Richard stopped to photograph were made more beautiful by their noticing. They were left more beautiful, once they walked away. By the end of the day, Yale found himself seeing things in frames, saw the way the light hit fence posts, wanted to lap up the ripples of sun on a record store window.

And here is Fiona in 2015 at Richard's opening, looking at an array of b&w contact sheets titled "1983" with a survivor of that time, Julian. "Look," he said, pointing to a frame.

There she was herself, an arm around Terrence. In a restaurant, it looked like, She never remembered being that pretty, that happy. Claire was just an egg in an ovary, one more thing Fiona hadn't ruined yet. At the left of the shot was Yale, mouth open, talking to someone out of frame. A mirror behind them all, in which you could see a room of tables, diners, and Richard himself, camera flash for a head.
     She wanted to climb into the photo, to say, "Stop where you are."
     What that what the camera had done, at least? It had frozen them forever.
     Stay there, she thought. Stay there.
     Julian gave her a minute and then he said, "I was thinking about Hamlet. You know I was in it three different times, and I never got to be Hamlet? Actually it's Horatio I was thinking about. I never got to be him either."
     Fiona was filled with ridiculous, irrational love for Julian just then, for whatever he was about to say, because she could feel Nico beside her, and Yale and Terrence and all of them, rolling their eyes at Julian's making this about himself, about his acting, which was such a Julian thing to do, and they all loved him anyway, and she still did too.
     He said, "The whole play is about Hamlet trying to avenge his father's death, trying to tell the truth, right? And then when he dies, he hands it all to Horatio. In this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story. See, I'd have made a great Hamlet! But what a burden. To be Horatio. To be the one with the memory. And what's Horatio supposed to do with it? What the hell does Horatio do in act six?"
     Fiona leaned her forehead against Julian's. They stood like that for a moment, head to head, nose to nose. The warmth of his skin soaked into her body, all the way down to her feet.
     She still had the magnifying glass in her hand, clenched tight. She wanted to call Claire over, show her these photos, tell her what Julian had just said, try to explain, or to try to start to explain, what her life had been. How this show might begin to convey it all, the palimpsest that was her heart, the way things could be written over but never erased. She was simply never going to be a blank slate. 

I will definitely be reading more of Rebecca Makkai. She created a world, harsh and beautiful, that I feel improved me for having glimpsed it.