New York, NY: Viking Press, 2018. 432 pages. $27.00.
“Time travel is so easy! It’s devastatingly easy! All you have to do is live long enough!” These are the words of Nora, one of the characters in Rebecca Makkai’s latest novel, The Great Believers. These words point to the way that Makkai powerfully moves the reader through several periods in our history to reveal what we can learn from the “time travel” of memory. Makkai has long accomplished such adroit work in her previous novels, short story collection, and common appearances in The Best American Short Stories, including one of my favorite stories where a tiny Johann Sebastian Bach appears in the apartment of a woman who lived through 9/11. Makkai’s attention to time in this story demonstrates the effects of trauma, the joys of the fanciful, and the ways that we endure. The Great Believers is no different in its detailed consideration of the past as she focuses on several groups who view themselves as outsiders and protesters. Their tale is truly their own, but the reader should also see how these characters’ struggles resonate with our own troubles and times as we travel back to theirs. This focus on what we learn from the problems of those distinct from ourselves, whether that be because of identity category or placement in time, echoes throughout the pages of The Great Believers.
Nora’s comment about memory as a kind of time travel serves as a motif for the novel. Having lived through her young adulthood in the France art scene of the 1920s to her old age in the 1980s, her experiences demonstrate this idea, but so too does the structure of the book. The Great Believers is shaped by counterpointing chapters that switch between 1985 (and moving forward) and 2015. We follow the stories of Yale Tishman, a twenty-something gay man in Chicago during the AIDS crisis. Thirty years later in Paris, we follow Yale’s friend Fiona (and the niece of Nora), now in her fifties, as she tries to track down her adult daughter Claire. The novel’s shifting timelines link the two main periods—and characters—as well as Nora’s 1920s heyday. Creating a sense of wonder about time and the memories gained through the stories and people we share, the novel shows that not only does 2015 have echoes of the eighties but also occasionally the eighties seem to echo the present. A variety of voices helps to bring all of the stories together.
Unfortunately, though, the memories aren’t just something gained, but also a testament to what has been lost. Nora talks about the artists lost during World War II and that reverberates with those lost during the AIDS epidemic over sixty years later: “Every time I’ve gone to a gallery, the rest of my life, I’ve thought about the works that weren’t there. Shadow-paintings, you know that no one can see but you. But there are all these happy young people around you and you realize no, they’re not bereft. They don’t see the empty spaces.” In addition to memory being about absence, it also contains the weight of responsibility, as Fiona asks, “But when someone’s gone and you’re the primary keeper of his memory—letting go would be a kind of murder, wouldn’t it?” Nora and the other still living characters remember with joy, they see the connections, they mourn for what isn’t there now, and they sometimes feel the burden of being those who are left alive to remember.
The writing in this novel is lovely. While most of it is direct in its realistic approach, there is one chapter written in very short paragraphs, many only a sentence, which appears in the novel right after one character is told he has AIDS. The individual lines speak of all the things in the future that the character now knows he won’t experience:
His favorite song, not yet written. His favorite movie, not yet made. . . . The Cubs winning the pennant someday. The cubs winning the Series. The Cubs continuing to lose. . . . Arthritis. Gray hair. Bushy eyebrows, like his father’s. Dentures, canes, prostate issues. . . . Owning a house. Painting the door, so he could tell his friends to look for the purple door. . . . All the books he hadn’t started.
The pain of the accumulation of this loss in these fragile sentences structurally parallels the accumulation of the loss of so many lives and potential memories. Makkai’s words show the awesomeness and the smallness of our lives.
In addition to the power of individual lines, there is a power in the surprising tension that builds through the story. We know that most of these young men will die during the epidemic both because of the history itself and our ability to leap to 2015 in alternative chapters, but you hope for healthy results every time a HTLV-III blood test is taken. Additionally, Makkai manages to make the business of university development thrilling. Yale is trying to obtain Nora’s art collection for Northwestern’s budding art gallery, and it keeps you on the edge of your seat as you agree that “what Indiana Jones was to a regular archeology professor, Yale was right now to a regular development director of a modest gallery.” Makkai also finds a way to focus that deep-seated suspense not on the major figures of the time, but on this everyday collection of people. For instance, we, along with the characters, wait with baited breath to hear the completion of a story not about the famous artists Nora knew from the 1920s, but about the one who slipped through the cracks of formal history.
Meanwhile, in the future/present of the summer of 2015, Fiona travels to France in search of her daughter who had run away to a cult and then run away with a man. Fiona finds herself in Paris during the Paris terrorist attack in Saint-Denis, and suddenly the 1920s artist enclave of expatriots, the group of Chicago gay men during the AIDS crisis, and Fiona’s daughter in Paris all feel like they are parts of a larger history and yet part of a shared story at the same time, starting with their commonality as outsiders and artists. The shape of the narrative allows the past and the present to interact without conflating the specificity of those moments.
The stories overlap because of the bond between the two main characters of Fiona and Yale from the start, but Makkai finds clever ways to keep those connections growing between not just the two of them, but also among them and characters like Nora and Nico, Fiona’s brother. For instance, Fiona builds that tie when she thinks in the present: “That a French café would have Wi-Fi seemed wrong. In her mind, Paris was always 1920. It was always Aunt Nora’s Paris, all tragic love and tubercular artists.” She also thinks about Nico who died in the 1980s: “The other fantasy was the one where Nico walked beside her everywhere, wondering what the hell things were. He was Rip Van Winkle, and it was her job to explain the modern world,” explaining things like “a firewall for your cloud,” while she imagined him saying to her, “You’re living in the future.” Here we see not just how the different sections are tied to each other through people but also how our shifting perspectives on time is an ongoing theme.
This is a book about loss, but it is also about a sense of continuance through the stories we tell, their tellers, and the lessons we learn from them. Those lost will remain in the minds of these characters and, now, in the minds of the reader. The Great Believers is devastating and beautiful, and very worth remembering.
