![]() ![]() Its rousing final pages take Fiona to the art show of an old friend of Yale’s as she encounters a film featuring the men she, Yale, and so many others loved and lost - “boys with hands in pockets, waiting for everything to begin. Have you ever been to or lived in a place that exerted a strong influence on you 4. Chicago is such a powerful presence in this novel that it is almost a character in itself. But if The Great Believers is heartbreaking, it isn’t quite dire. How has the culture changed regarding LGBTQ+ voices and stories since the 1980s 3. She inherits an agony that informs her parental failings - a legacy traced by Makkai with lucidity, as well as ample melancholy. Fiona, as she grows older, cares for infected gay men who can’t care for themselves anymore, and watches them pass on, body by body. Yale pursues an elderly art donor - a relative of Fiona’s - who confides in him about the deaths that surrounded her WWI-era youth he’s confronted with the deep pain of merely living, of carrying on as everything meaningful around him disappears. But the book’s grander scope comes into focus. ![]() Their journeys initially seem a tad too detached, vignettes linked largely by the world they once shared. The 1980s was a time of great sadness and anger, a time of irrefutable tenderness. As for who lingers longest, that’d still be Yale and Fiona. ![]()
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