![]() “The Great Believers” is peppered with surprises, a minor wonder in a narrative so rife with dreadfully foregone conclusions. ![]() ![]() For them, as for many, questions about fidelity, and about secrets, take on a new urgency once contagion enters the picture. ![]() Gentle and thoroughly decent, he lives with Charlie Keene, the publisher of a gay newspaper, who is possessive, sulk-prone and just generally a piece of work. Primary among the group (many of whom have already slept with, and infected, one another, back when sex seemed harmless) is a young man named Yale Tishman, recently hired by Northwestern University to help establish a permanent collection for a campus art gallery. The cohort of friends and lovers in Makkai’s novel live in a constant state of morbid apprehension, first awaiting their test results and then, if the news is bad, awaiting their initial symptoms. An AIDS diagnosis, in 1985, was considered a death sentence. There was no medication except a drug known as AZT, which was mostly a palliative, and not a very effective one. By 1985, in one of the crueler ironies of the century, gay men had learned that the liberation of the libido, the casting-off of eons-old shame, had exposed them to an implacable, hitherto unknown virus. was first identified in 1983) were terrifying in their own particular way. Although it would be impossible, not to mention morally reprehensible, to try to single out the most ruinous period in the AIDS pandemic, those initial years (H.I.V. ![]()
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