It's been a busy six months since my last post, from starting graduate school, to getting engaged, to moving into my first house with my fiance this weekend. Books have been my getaway in order to keep my sanity, but with constant homework and life planning, I found I had little energy to then write about the books myself. I've been trying to figure out how to make it all fit, and I figure if I just dive in and start writing, rather than think about writing, that's a good start.
The Great Believers was all over instagram in the latter half of 2018. I have often been intimidated by longer books since I started working full time, as my time to read is no longer proportional to the stack of books I want to read on a monthly basis. It always feels like a bigger commitment to pick up a book that's over 400 pages than one that comes in right at 300, even if the difference could be conquered in one rainy Sunday afternoon. I finally convinced myself to start The Great Believers after receiving it as a Christmas present two months ago. I had no ideas about the book's premise, just that it was popular and had a beautiful cover.
The Great Believers takes place across two timelines set thirty years apart in 1985 and 2015. In 1985, you follow a group of young gay men that are living and dying through the AIDS epidemic. We experience these tragic losses through the eyes of Yale, a young professional in Chicago that works for the art gallery at Northwestern University. The book opens with the funeral for his close friend Nico, the first of the friend group to die of AIDS, but he won't be the last. Yale's life falls apart repeatedly as one after another of his friends become infected, with little time in between for him to really recover. He handles these blows with such admirable grace that I was quickly attached to him as a character.
Thirty years late in 2015, Nico's little sister, Fiona, is in search of her daughter, Claire. Claire dropped out of college her freshman year to join a cult in Colorado, and Fiona hasn't seen her since the day she tried to convince her to come home several years ago. She flies to Paris on a whim after seeing a woman very similar to Claire in the background of an advertisement filmed in Paris. You learn that Fiona has been running a store to benefit AIDS research and recovery for years, and that her heart never really healed after losing so many of her friends in the eighties. "Saint Fiona of Boystown" took care of so many dying friends in her twenties, that you see thirty years later her heartbreak from the 1980's is still affecting her relationships.
I always enjoy a book with two timelines and seeing how the author ultimately has them converge in order to fully tell the story. The book started out slow for me, and had me wondering what story the author was really trying to communicate. The pace picked up after the first 150 pages, and I ended up really caring about what happened to Yale and Fiona. I became so attached to both protagonists that I found myself not wanting the story to end, to keep reading about their lives. The last 100 pages of this story are so worth the first 150 page build. If you don't mind investing a little more time in a book and appreciate character development at the risk of a slower plot, The Great Believers is a well-written, heartbreaking look at the AIDS epidemic and the long-term effects it had on one group of friends in Chicago.
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