The Great Believers
A dual timeline following a group of friends during the 1980s AIDS crisis in Chicago and an art dealer in 2015 Paris. Makkai wrote the definitive AIDS novel of its generation, rich with love and loss and the way grief travels through decades.
Fiona's 2015 Paris strand, built around her estranged daughter's exit into a cult, is the part even fans of the 1980s Chicago material flag as weak; a critic put it plainly, noting the novel “doesn't always manage to make all the plates spin perfectly.” Some readers call the whole book “a baggy structure that flips between 1985 and 2015” without earning the split, and a minority push further, calling the prose itself “lengthy, repetitive, and difficult to enjoy.” A specific complaint about the AIDS-era community stings more: one reviewer describes the characters as “a joyless bunch, defined by their jobs and disease,” missing the humor and vitality she remembers from people who actually lived through the epidemic.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
