The Great Believers

4.5
Incredibly powerful and impactful

“Nora said, ‘That's why I picked you... Because you'll understand. It was a ghost town. Some of those boys were dear friends.'”
This is one of those books that is way more than it initially seems while you're reading it. In fact, if I didn't stop once in a while to reflect on the story, I wouldn't have liked it as much. There are parts of the book that made me wonder why it was even included in the story, particularly in the 2015 chapters, but also the details of Yale's art dealings in the 80s. (The book's chapters flip from the 1980s to 2015)
But this is because despite what one might get from the blurb, this isn't simply about the AIDS epidemic in Chicago's gay community, it is also about how we as individuals and societies reckon with unspeakable atrocities. The book is peppered with major world events besides AIDS, and while the characters around it all stop to feel really horrible about it, their own issues quickly take over as being more important. Of course this is natural, and even one of the main characters admits in 2015 that that “Deep down, she didn't care quite on the same visceral level about the ongoing AIDS crisis in Africa”.
Understanding this, the book also contains a side story about a woman's time in post-WWI France, and shows striking similarities between what the war did to a generation of young men in Europe and culture more broadly, and what AIDS did to a generation of young men and culture in America. The book then begs the question of whether the AIDS crisis should be remembered in the same light as the Challenger explosion - of something that happened in the 80s that was really sad - or in the same light as a great war - a key point in our culture's history in which many thousands of innocent young men died far too young - and makes a strong argument for the latter perspective.
Quote from near the end of the book: "I keep thinking of Nora's stories about the guys who just shut down after the war. This is a war, it is. It's like you've been in the trenches for seven years. And no one's gonna understand that. No one's gonna give you a Purple Heart."
Of course, in popular culture, the story of AIDS in America is treated more like simply a sad thing that happened, and there was a quilt and a concert, and now we can talk about something else. And after reading how these gay characters talked about their situation in light of the politics and the stigma of that time, one can't help but think that we treat it as lesser because our culture still sees LGBTQ people and culture as something separate from the rest of our culture, and so AIDS is a sad thing that happened to them and their society, and somehow even though we know better than to treat it as a “gay cancer” now, it still isn't treated like something that happened to all of us. The massive loss of life is all of our loss, like the great wars, and we should treat it that way.
The 2015 parts of the book also have a lot going for them, along the same themes of what matters most to us, and what should matter most, and how we prioritize how and who we love. But I feel I'm rambling, and that part impacted me less viscerally, so I'll avoid going on about other themes I kind of liked, and just encourage you to read the book.