The Great Believers shifts between two narratives and time periods as it chronicles the AIDS epidemic in Chicago during the 1980s, illuminating the loss and struggle of the day-to-day realities of living and loving during the height of the AIDS crisis. The disappearance of his friends in such a quick sweep is a simulacrum of the AIDS epidemic that Yale and his community have begun facing-friends and loved ones together one moment and gone the next. They are not in the basement, in the backyard or on the front lawn. While resting, he has an imaginary moment in which he dreams that everyone from the party is gone. Overwhelmed by the reality of Nico’s death and his emotional energy exhausted, he goes upstairs to rest. In an early scene of Rebecca Makkai’s new novel, The Great Believers, the protagonist Yale Tishman attends a memorial service for his friend Nico at the house of a mutual friend.
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