“The Great Believers” by Rebecca Makkai

The author Rebecca Makkai has come up a couple times already in this space, first in a quick mention regarding the character names in her excellent recent novel, I Have Some Questions for You, then later in a discussion of the structure of suspense in literature. Also she has a blog that’s included in the Cultural section of our links page.

This all came up because I just finished another Makkai novel, The Great Believers, which I also liked a lot. I’d say I “enjoyed” it–I think that’s an accurate description of a book that I read a few pages every day at bedtime until one day I just sat on the couch and read the last 30 pages–except that the story is sad, so in that sense the reading experience wasn’t quite enjoyable. In any case, I recommend it.

The book did something with time that really worked. Chapters alternated between 1985 and 2015, where you see some of the characters from the earlier time period reappear. This gives some perspective (as logician and sometime Chicagoan Raymond Smullyan memorably said, “To know the past, one must first know the future.” But it’s not just that. There’s some way in which placing the main action in the 1985, but situating the story in the present time, makes the people in 1985 seem more alive then the would feel in a straight-up historical novel. I’m not quite sure why this would be, and I don’t think the parallel-time-line thing always works–indeed, I’ve read novels that use it and it seems more like a gimmick, underlying the artificiality of the story–but in this case I found it to be very moving.

One more thing. From the author description:

Makkai is on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Northwestern University, and is the artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago. She lives on the campus of the midwestern boarding school where her husband teaches, and in Vermont.

Which leaves me with some questions:

1. If it’s “the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe,” why don’t they just call it “the University of Nevada, Lake Tahoe”?

2. I wonder if she knows the story of the torment executioners at the University of Nevada, Reno? I have a feeling that the characters in The Great Believers would be very amused by the idea of a torment executioner.

3. Makkai has 3 jobs in 2 different states, and then also lives in a third state? How does she do it? I’m reminded of this guy:

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is a resident faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

I guess some people just have a lot of energy. I’m pretty sure that Ferguson would hate Makkai’s book, though, given that he’s famous for a homophobic slur and The Great Believers is a sympathetic portrayal of gay life.