THE GREAT BELIEVERS by Rebecca Makkai

The characters in this novel are so vivid and haunting that I could not get them out of my mind.  The novel follows two related stories, one in 1985 and one in 2015.  Yale, a young gay man in Chicago trying to navigate the AIDS epidemic, is the main character in the 1985 story, and, for me, his sections are the most riveting.  Fiona is the star of the 2015 sections, but she appears as a 21-year-old in the earlier storyline as well.  Her parents disowned her gay brother Nico who later died of AIDS, and she became good friends with both his partner and many of his friends, including Yale.  After mothering many of these young men through their dying days, she fails her own daughter, Claire.  Thirty years later Fiona is in Paris attempting to reconnect with Claire, who now has a daughter of her own.  Yale’s story, though, is more gripping.  Fiona’s twenty-first century storyline at times seemed a welcome distraction, but I still wanted to race through those sections so that I could get back to Yale’s troubles, which were so much more weighty and at times devastating.  Not only are his friends becoming infected, but he endures the stress of worrying about his own health, as well as a work project involving millions of dollars’ worth of previously undiscovered art.  This is just a terrific novel and not so much sad as moving.  The author does a tremendous job of delineating all the characters so that there’s never any confusion as to who’s who.  Also, I found it unusual that she made the male characters, almost all of whom are gay, so much more relatable than the women.  I thoroughly adored Yale, despite some really horrific lapses of judgment whose consequences the reader can see coming like a runaway train.  My biggest question at the end of the novel is “What happened to Roman?”