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. This isn’t a negative quality it’s another piece of the book’s authenticity.” The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai She doesn’t reflect much on her behavior, or offer evidence that she understands why she acts so self-destructively. Coldiron writes, of the book’s narrator: “Callie is a heroine to remember, a perfect personification of the era of adolescence when decisions were easily made and long regretted. Next, Katharine Coldiron reviews Eleanor Kriseman’s debut novel The Blurry Years. Preston writes: “With this, her fourth book, Makkai has crafted a deeply compassionate character study that is also a genuine, one-more-chapter-before-bed pageturner, a sweeping historical saga that never loses sight of its emotional core.” First up, Will Preston reviews our Volume VII judge Rebecca Makkai’s latest novel The Great Believers. Today, we present reviews of two recent summer releases. 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.There is nothing like a good book in the summertime. But if The Great Believers is heartbreaking, it isn’t quite dire. 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. As for who lingers longest, that’d still be Yale and Fiona.
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