Yale’s own life is compromised when he learns he has been exposed to the virus. The two storylines work together like a duet, a call-and-response song, where an issue rises in one and can concludes in the other. Fiona’s past eclipses her present and creates a deep resentment between Fiona and her daughter, Claire, who feels her mother’s emotional absenteeism has damaged their relationship Nico’s death is always casting its shadow over Claire’s life.įiona’s narrative provides a well-rendered contrast and complement to the stories and problems that arise in Yale’s narrative. The second narrative details the life of Fiona (Nico’s sister) in 2015, where she lives with the traumas and wounds of the epidemic that claimed her brother and many close friends and is currently searching for her estranged daughter in Paris, France. Yale works for Northwestern’s nascent art museum, where he meets Nora, who has a clandestine art collection that includes works by Modigliani and Foujita, among others, that he desperately wants to secure for the museum. The first explores Yale’s life in the 1980s where he lives with his partner, Charlie Keene, editor and founder of the gay newspaper Out Loud a life where attending the funerals of their friends has become disturbingly normal. The Great Believers shifts between two narratives and time periods as it chronicles the AIDS epidemic in Chicago during the 1980s, illuminating the loss and struggle of the day-to-day realities of living and loving during the height of the AIDS crisis. The disappearance of his friends in such a quick sweep is a simulacrum of the AIDS epidemic that Yale and his community have begun facing-friends and loved ones together one moment and gone the next. They are not in the basement, in the backyard or on the front lawn. While resting, he has an imaginary moment in which he dreams that everyone from the party is gone. Overwhelmed by the reality of Nico’s death and his emotional energy exhausted, he goes upstairs to rest. In an early scene of Rebecca Makkai’s new novel, The Great Believers, the protagonist Yale Tishman attends a memorial service for his friend Nico at the house of a mutual friend.
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