This isn’t the oldest thing on my TBR–that honor probably goes to either of Arundhati Roy’s novels The God of Small Things or Ministry of Utmost Happiness–but it’s definitely a long simmering recommendation from Lydia. But once I read the blurb, it made it so hard to pick up. When is anyone in the mood for reading about 1980s and the height of the AIDS pandemic? Even if it is in Chicago, which isn’t one of the cities we usually associated with the time period? Ergo, the multiple (MULTIPLE) times that I checked this out from the library, renewed it, didn’t touch it, returned it. I even did it this past December with the actual book from my local library!
But then finally, something made me actually start it. And then I simply couldn’t stop.
How could she explain that this city was a graveyard? That they were walking every day through streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy, that when they stepped through a pocket of cold air, didn’t they understand it was a ghost, it was a boy the world had spat out?
The book flips back and forth between 1980s Chicago and 2015 Paris, linked together by Fiona (the sister of the man whose memorial service kicks off the book, and who is friends with/part of the circle of men whose lives are chronicled here. I’ll start off by noting that I, like many other people, found Fiona’s interludes less engaging than those of Yale. In general, there’s something mildly irksome to have Fiona as our ‘cipher’ into the thriving gay scene of 1980s Chicago (is it because Makkai, of Hungarian descent, has the most proximity to her as a character?) but I found myself more empathetic and invested in her inner turmoil and PTSD (frankly) as the book went on and the tension/suspense of Chicago–who will get AIDS? who won’t?–wound down. And that’s because it’s the Fionas of the world (and the [redacted]s) who hold onto the memory of what those terrifying, alienating times were like, and live with the associated trauma while surrounded by a world that can’t fathom what it was like a mere generation ago.
The parallel with the École de Paris (Paris in the 1920s, all shimmery optimism that The Great War was over and with it the old guard) helps to ground Makkai’s fundamental premise by referencing World War II–a global tragedy that, honestly, we all study a lot. The loss of a generation, the optimism and joie de vivre giving way to suspicion and isolation, the apathy towards the effects on the common little man…you leave this book, as Makkai hopes, with a sense that you don’t really understand the horror that was being gay and American in the late 1980s when your government and society was hoping to ignore you and leave you for dead, where the only options feel like ruthless celibacy or mistrust or putting on Masque of the Red Death and giving up. It brings to mind polio, smallpox, ebola, any number of diseases that inspired terror but also empathy and societal stiff-upper-lip-mustering. Imagine that, but a relentless, shaming cold shoulder.
In other parallels, this book is everything A Little Life wanted to be when it grew up. The story it tells is one of friendship and solidarity and betrayal and love and found family, but it’s told while contextualized by the inherent joy and goodness of the community that it featured. I never had the sense that Yanagihara cared about her characters as much as the story she threw them into. Makkai clearly loves Yale (and Charlie and Nico and Asher and Julian and Teddy) and puts them through hell in the service of doing them–and the men they represent–justice. Their love is all the more powerful because of what they were facing, and the respite those emotions give us allow us to fully engage with the story.