The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

 

There was a wet fizzle at the coffee shop this afternoon, a novel that was clearly not working for me, so I bailed after like sixty pages. This, though: This was emphatically not a fizzle of any kind. Ms. Makkai writes with wit and passion here, telling interconnected stories of the slow-motion catastrophe that was AIDS among the gay subculture in the 1980s and about a woman whose brother had died in that catastrophe trying to resurrect or reconstruct or resomethingorother her relationship with her daughter. So much of the novel just rings with loss--the grief here isn't just for the dying, it's for the living and the innocence and hope they lost so much as the friends and lovers--that the little glimmers in the last few chapters feel like a goddamned sunrise, some sort of moment to be grasped and clung to because there are always people who can't stand that there are people who love and are happy in different ways than theirs. A beautiful, heartrending, eventually optimistic (ish) novel.