The Great Believers
Rebecca Makkai’s 2018 novel, The Great Believers, explores themes of trauma, lost generations, parenting, death, emotional inheritance, and the repetition of generational struggles as its weaves two stories throughout. One storyline begins with Yale Tishman in Boystown, Chicago circa the mid-1980s as AIDS lays waste to the gay community. The other takes Fiona (who was a very young woman affiliated with Yale’s world in the mid-‘80s) to Paris in search of her missing adult daughter, Claire, in the year 2015. The two stories seem wildly divergent (except for some overlap in characters), but as Makkai knits up her novel, they begin to inform one another more and more, both in terms of characters and thematically.
Nora, Fiona’s great aunt, is a survivor of the Lost Generation of WWI Paris, just as Fiona survives the AIDS epidemic that annihilates her brother and many of her closest friends in the mid-1980s/early 1990s. Both women live with the ghosts of their lost loves, and those ghosts impact the lives of their family members who come afterwards. It is not until one of Fiona’s ghosts (re)appears in 2015 Paris that she is able to lay to rest some of her grief and guilt and loss. In turn, she is able to fully show up for the generations that follow her: her daughter and her daughter’s daughter.
This is a book that I found terribly hard to read at times. The suffering described during the AIDS epidemic as well as that of the pre- and post-WWI Paris-based artist community is heart-wrenching and wildly depressing. This book took me some time to finish because I had to walk away from its heartbreak several times. Yet the beauty of Makkai’s writing, the sheer humanity of her characters, and the grappling with mortality, community, and love at the heart of this novel, kept me coming back until at last I settled in (about half-way through) to reading straight-through until the final pages.
There are so many things I could say about this novel. As a child of the early 1980s, Makkai’s novel educated me a great deal about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, and I found myself horrified not only by the suffering, but by the ways the gay community was ostracized on account of the disease. I applaud Makkai’s comparison between the Lost Generation of the early 20th century that centered around Paris and the generation lost in the 1980s to AIDS; it removes the homophobia that seems to get in the way of some people’s ability to empathize with the dreadfulness of that situation. The Great Believers includes many instances when Makkai’s characters ruminate upon the nature of human mortality and love in ways that are poetic, pithy, and memorable. While this is by no means a gentle read, it is a worthwhile one that I encourage brave readers to embrace.
Novel’s Epigram:
“We were the great believers.
I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved—and who now walk the long stormy summer.”
--F. Scott Fitzgerald, “My Generation”
“the world is a wonder, but the portions are small”
--Rebecca Hazelton, “Slash Fiction”
A Few Great Passages:
“What if Fiona had simply failed, as distracted as she was in those early years of Clair’s life, to tether her daughter tightly enough to the world?” (92).
“Nora always claimed there were two distinct genetic strains in the family—the artistic one and the analytic one—and that you got one set of genes or the other. It was true that Fiona’s father, who had probably wanted to hand down his orthodontic practice one day, had absolutely no idea what to do with Nico, even before his sexuality came into play. Lloyd Marcus tried to turn his son into a chess player, tried to teach him to keep score at baseball games. All Nico wanted was to trace the comics out of the Sunday paper, draw space-/ ships and animals. It was their mother who tried, in her ineffectual way, to remind Lloyd that his Aunt Nora was an artist after all, and hadn’t there been a poet on the Cuban side of the family tree?” (109-110).
“‘[W]hen I was your age, I assumed it would all be downhill after fifty. Well. Ageism is the only self-correcting prejudice, isn’t it?’” (113).
“It hadn’t occurred to Fiona till just now, her hands gripping the cold bridge railing, that her mother might have known where she was going all those weekends, all those years. [. . .] Maybe her mother had left her purse unguarded for a reason. As she called Claire’s name one last time into the wind, as the city returned her voice on the wet air, Fiona remembered her mother calling and calling for Nico in the yard when they were kids. Had she ever stopped calling for him? Had she ever stopped leaving coins around, hoping they’d find their way to her boy?” (151).
“There was this competitive grieving thing that could happen. People would crowd into the hospital and stand around for days, sort of posturing. That sounds terrible, but it’s true. Not that they had bad intentions just . . . you always want to believe you’re important in someone’s life. And sometimes, in the end, it turns out you aren’t” (172).
“The truth was his body missed Charlie, or missed Charlie’s body. Just the presence of it. Not sexually, not yet [. . .] Well, here it was, then: longing, missing. The most useless kind of love” (209).
“It was all Fiona hoped for, herself—to be allowed back in. She hadn’t messed up as badly as Kurt—she hadn’t been arrested, at least—but maybe she’d messed up for longer. And maybe it was harder to forgive your mother than a man. She’d always figured that her own failings would make more and more sense to Claire as she grew up—that an adult / would understand an affair (such a garden variety mistake!) in a way a child couldn’t have. Shouldn’t Claire know the messiness of the human heart by now?” (219-220).
“Well if you were going to be miserable, you could be miserable anywhere. She’d known that for years: the way one person could starve to death at the banquet, the way you could sob through the funniest movie” (224).
“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” (239).
“A handful of dead astronauts and Reagan weeps with the nation. Thirteen thousand dead gay men and Reagan’s too busy” (246).
“‘Because you’ll understand: It was a ghost town. Some of those boys were dear friends. It’d studied next to them for two years. I’d run around with them, doing all the ridiculous things you do when you’re young, I could tell you their names, but it wouldn’t mean a thing to you. If I told Picasso died in the war, you’d understand. Poof, there foes Guernica. But I tell you Jacques Weiss died at the Somme, and you don’ t know what to miss. It—you know what, it prepared me for being old. All my friends are dying, or they’re dead already, but I’ve been through it before” (252).
“In the hospital, when Claire was born, Fiona had been so flooded by hormones and panic and grief and fear and guilt and revulsion that when Damian brought her the baby, impossibly small and alien, its body a lurid pink, Fiona told him to take it away, to keep it safe from her. She had some horrid, febrile vision of a mother animal smothering its young, eating it. In fact, Fiona did have a fever” (259).
“‘You know, when they call us the Lost Generation—Was it Hemingway who said that, or Fitzgerald?’
Roman said, ‘It was—sorry—it was something Gertrude Steind said to Hemingway. But, I mean, he was the one who wrote it down.’
‘Good. Well. I can’t see a better way to put it. We’d been through something our parents hadn’t. The war made us older than our parents. And when you’re older than your parents, what are you going to do? Whose going to show you how to live?’” (311).
“ ‘I’m sure you think I’m foolish to stay so devoted to someone so difficult. [. . .] It’s not as if it kept me from living my life. It he’d lived, we’d have parted ways soon enough. He’d have had a life out there in the world, outside my mind. But when someone’s gone and you’re the primary keeper of his memory—letting go would be a kind of murder, wouldn’t it? I had so much love for him, even if it was a complicated love, and where is all that love supposed go? He was gone, so it couldn’t change, it couldn’t turn to indifference. I was stuck with all that love” (312).
“It’s always a matter, isn’t it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled. When things hold together, it’s always only temporary” (318).
“Of course all altruism was in some way selfish. And maybe, too, she only had room in her heart, in this lifetime, for one big cause, the arc of one disaster. Claire, it seemed, had certainly grown up feeling it—that her mother’s greatest love was always focused on something just over the horizon of the past” (345).
“‘I think that’s the saddest thing in the world, the failure of love. Not hatred, but the failure of love’” (353).
“‘I used to worry about Reagan pressing the button, yuou know? And asteroids, all that. And then I had this realization. If you had to choose when, in the timeline of the earth, you got to live—wouldn’t you choose the end? You haven’t missed anything, then. You die in 1920, you miss rock and roll. You die in 1600, you miss Mozart. Right? I mean, the horrors pile up, too, but no one wants to die before the end of the story.
‘And I really used to believe we’re be the last generation. Life, if I thought about it, if I worried about death, it was all of us I was thinking / about, the whole planet. And now it’s like, no, it’s just you, Yale. You’re the one who’s gonna miss out. Not even on the end of the world—like, let’s hope the world goes on another billion years, right?—but just the normal stuff’” (383).
“ ‘If we could just be on earth at the same place and same time as everyone we loved, if we could be born together and die together, it would be so simple. And it’s not. But listen: You two are on the planet at the same time. You’re in the same place now. That’s a miracle. I just want to say that’” (401).
Bibliography:
Makkai, Rebecca. The Great Believers: A Novel. Viking, New York: 2018.
