It’s hard to talk about The Great Believers without speaking in superlatives. It will leave behind a landscape of empty rooms and deserted streets, unfinished lives, a ghost town spanning the entire world. By the time the novel ends, this opening chapter will have assumed the weight of prophecy, a harbinger of the “slow-motion tsunami” rising to sweep away the lives of thousands of men. Yet The Great Believers is, in fact, about an apocalypse of sorts: the AIDS crisis of the mid-’80s and early-’90s, of which Nico is the first victim in Yale’s group of friends but certainly not the last.
It’s a startling scene to open with, a moment whose eeriness seems more suited to the post-apocalypse of Station Eleven or an episode of The Twilight Zone. Yale hoped for a siren, a horn, a dog, an airplane across the night sky. He heard the vague rush of cars far away, but that could have been wind, couldn’t it? Or even the lake. He saw no bobbing heads in neighbors’ windows…at the end of the block, the traffic signal turned from green to yellow to red. …the foggy, ridiculous idea came to him that the world had ended, that some apocalypse had swept through and forgotten only him. As an unsettled Yale wanders the empty house, searching for his friends:
Half-drunk bottles and cocktail glasses are scattered throughout the room the vinyl record spins in silence. When he emerges, some thirty minutes later, he is greeted by a surreal sight: the party has been abruptly abandoned.
The actual funeral, for a young man named Nico Marcus, is unfolding concurrently twenty miles north: it’s 1985, and Nico is dead from AIDS, and his family has made it abundantly clear that his lover and tight-knit circle of friends are unwelcome at the church where he is being laid to rest.Ībout halfway through the night, one of Nico’s closest friends, Yale Tishman, is overcome with emotion and retreats upstairs to collect himself. More specifically, it opens at a funeral party. The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai’s magnificent new novel, opens at a funeral.
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