The Great Believers

The Great Believers is Rebecca Makkai's 2018 novel, the National Book Award finalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist of 2019 and the canonical contemporary American literary novel about the 1980s AIDS crisis. The structural premise is two parallel timelines: Yale Tishman, a Chicago art gallery development director in the mid-1980s as the AIDS crisis is destroying his community, and Fiona Marcus (the younger sister of Yale's friend Nico, who died of AIDS in 1985) in 2015 Paris searching for her estranged daughter Claire. The Chicago chapters run forward from 1985 through the late-1980s; the Paris chapters cover approximately one month in 2015 as Fiona tries to locate Claire while reckoning with the inheritance of having grown up among the dying generation.

Makkai's structural method is the patient cross-cutting between the two timelines, with the Yale-and-the-Chicago-art-world chapters carrying the structural emotional weight and the Fiona-in-Paris chapters operating as the structural counterpoint that makes the question explicit (what does the survivor generation owe the dead generation, what does the inheritance look like, and what does the 2010s reader inherit from the 1980s AIDS losses). The Boystown gallery chapters in the middle third are some of the strongest contemporary American literary prose about a specific working-art-world community. The Nora Marcus subplot (Fiona's great-aunt who knew Yale's art-dealer mentor) operates as the third structural thread and lets Makkai run the historical-art-collecting material that anchors the novel's broader argument about cultural inheritance.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right Makkai entry point alongside I Have Some Questions for You (2023), and as one of the canonical contemporary novels about the AIDS crisis. Read alongside A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara) on the broader contemporary American literary tradition of intense male-friendship-and-grief novels. The Michael Crouch audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.