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lydySo, let's just start with this: Do not read Makkai if you are in a fragile emotional space. She is utterly amazing, and I am still processing I Have Some Questions For You. She writes beautiful, structured, carefully observed and beautifully rendered descriptions of life. The Great Believers is largely set in Chicago in the late 80s and early 90s in Boystown, as AIDs devastates the gay community. So, the subject matter is pretty grim. But it is beautifully, beautifully written, and if you have the emotional space for it, you should read it.
It is not hopeful novel. Hopeful is deeply incorrect. But it is deeply invested in the project of living and loving. It depicts disaster and the mundane messiness of being human in minute detail in ways where not only do I feel seen, but I feel like I can see other people more clearly. It isn't neat, it isn't gentle. But it does a thing which is very interesting to me: it uses the modern day context, the one where AIDS isn't a death sentence, where gay relationships are much more normal, and where we all know what happened during the worst of the crisis, as an unstated part of the narrative. The hope is there, but it isn't in the novel, it's in the world we currently inhabit. And that's an interesting thing to have done.
Over and over again, I found myself noticing the ways in which the characters are making choices about what they say, how the present themselves, that are weirdly alien but familiar. And I would realize, yes, gay people used to have to do this, and they don't anymore. Makkai never makes a big deal of it, never emphasizes it. But she's such a good observer, so you can really see, really feel how things are different, now. And that is both a triumph and a grief, and again, she does it so very well.
There's a pretty good review of it in the NYT with the terrible title of "Surviving the AIDS crisis, but at what cost?" When I finished the book, that was one of the things that I was thinking about. Was it worth it to Fiona, to have survived, to have done all the things she did? But the book never, ever engages in that question. And I realize that Makkai isn't avoiding the question, that it just actually isn't a question. To ask that question is to assume that you can know the outcomes of your actions, that you can make a ROI decision tree. Life is never like that. There's a character, Debra, whose grandmother is giving away art that her grandmother had collected when she was a model in Paris before the Great War. And Debra is extremely bitter about the value of the artwork, but also extremely bitter that she, herself, has never had a great adventure like her grandmother. But Debra counts the cost. She lives her life carefully, and what she doesn't understand about her grandmother is that Nora didn't count the cost. You can't count the cost. Life doesn't come with a price tag, it's just a series of choices.
My mind keeps on returning to the book. Instead of listening to my new book, my mind kept on returning to The Great Believers while I was biking, today. This is super spoilery, so I'll try to insert a cut, here: One of Fiona's great regrets is that Yale died alone. Mind you, she was busy almost dying in childbirth herself, but her guilt and the physical repercussions also impact her relationship with her daughter, change her life. As Yale is dying, we are given a long, dream-like sequence. As a general rule, I don't like dreams in fiction. However, I didn't skip ahead, because these were the last moments I would get to spend with Yale, and on some level, perhaps I didn't want him to die alone. And FIONA IS THERE. She's woven all through the sequence, she is his psychopomp, she walks with him to the end of the path. Yale doesn't die alone. In a way which is not factual but which is entirely true, Fiona is there for him. A thing she will never know, a thing which she cannot know. And this is Makkai, through and through. A gift, a mercy, and a knife. So there I am, biking on the Greenway on what is a truly beautiful fall day, weeping for a fictional character who died thirty years, and realizing once again that we literally never know what our kindness means to people.
At any rate, if you have the emotional bandwidth, I highly recommend this book.
It is not hopeful novel. Hopeful is deeply incorrect. But it is deeply invested in the project of living and loving. It depicts disaster and the mundane messiness of being human in minute detail in ways where not only do I feel seen, but I feel like I can see other people more clearly. It isn't neat, it isn't gentle. But it does a thing which is very interesting to me: it uses the modern day context, the one where AIDS isn't a death sentence, where gay relationships are much more normal, and where we all know what happened during the worst of the crisis, as an unstated part of the narrative. The hope is there, but it isn't in the novel, it's in the world we currently inhabit. And that's an interesting thing to have done.
Over and over again, I found myself noticing the ways in which the characters are making choices about what they say, how the present themselves, that are weirdly alien but familiar. And I would realize, yes, gay people used to have to do this, and they don't anymore. Makkai never makes a big deal of it, never emphasizes it. But she's such a good observer, so you can really see, really feel how things are different, now. And that is both a triumph and a grief, and again, she does it so very well.
There's a pretty good review of it in the NYT with the terrible title of "Surviving the AIDS crisis, but at what cost?" When I finished the book, that was one of the things that I was thinking about. Was it worth it to Fiona, to have survived, to have done all the things she did? But the book never, ever engages in that question. And I realize that Makkai isn't avoiding the question, that it just actually isn't a question. To ask that question is to assume that you can know the outcomes of your actions, that you can make a ROI decision tree. Life is never like that. There's a character, Debra, whose grandmother is giving away art that her grandmother had collected when she was a model in Paris before the Great War. And Debra is extremely bitter about the value of the artwork, but also extremely bitter that she, herself, has never had a great adventure like her grandmother. But Debra counts the cost. She lives her life carefully, and what she doesn't understand about her grandmother is that Nora didn't count the cost. You can't count the cost. Life doesn't come with a price tag, it's just a series of choices.
My mind keeps on returning to the book. Instead of listening to my new book, my mind kept on returning to The Great Believers while I was biking, today. This is super spoilery, so I'll try to insert a cut, here: One of Fiona's great regrets is that Yale died alone. Mind you, she was busy almost dying in childbirth herself, but her guilt and the physical repercussions also impact her relationship with her daughter, change her life. As Yale is dying, we are given a long, dream-like sequence. As a general rule, I don't like dreams in fiction. However, I didn't skip ahead, because these were the last moments I would get to spend with Yale, and on some level, perhaps I didn't want him to die alone. And FIONA IS THERE. She's woven all through the sequence, she is his psychopomp, she walks with him to the end of the path. Yale doesn't die alone. In a way which is not factual but which is entirely true, Fiona is there for him. A thing she will never know, a thing which she cannot know. And this is Makkai, through and through. A gift, a mercy, and a knife. So there I am, biking on the Greenway on what is a truly beautiful fall day, weeping for a fictional character who died thirty years, and realizing once again that we literally never know what our kindness means to people.
At any rate, if you have the emotional bandwidth, I highly recommend this book.
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Date: 2024-09-12 03:57 pm (UTC)That's very interesting and cool. I've really only seen it done the other way; in Tiny Pieces of Skull, Roz Kaveney's fictionalised memoir about life among trans sex workers in 70s Chicago, ofc the narrator doesn't know what's coming. Roz herself made it out ofc, but I felt the shadow of AIDS very powerfully a few times when I was reading - especially near the end where the narrator basically wonders how the others are doing/will do now she herself is back in London. I like the idea of a happier version of it!
That ending to Yale's life is amazing.