I began Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers on a Sunday and finished it three days later.
The novel moves between a group of friends, most of them gay men, in Chicago during the AIDS crisis and a woman searching Paris in 2015 for her estranged daughter. In the Chicago chapters, the ordinary uncertainties of love and fidelity acquire frightening consequences. Yet Makkai makes room for the friends’ wit and hope alongside their fear.
The two stories ask what the living owe to those they have lost. I underlined one line in my copy: “But what a burden, to be Horatio. To be the one with the memory.” Makkai understands that remembering can be an act of devotion and an exhausting way to live. Her lucid, openhearted prose makes that burden feel immediate. I am so grateful to have read this book.