Reviews

“But when someone’s gone and you’re the primary keeper of his memory—letting go would be a kind of murder, wouldn’t it? I had so much love for him, even if it was a complicated love, and where is all that love supposed to go? He was gone, so it couldn’t change, it couldn’t turn to indifference. I was stuck with all that love.”

The heart of this book centers on a found family of gay men in the late 1980's, early 1990's in Chicago, and obviously with that the hollowing out of their community by the AIDS epidemic... and the indifference shown to those impacted. This book is relentlessly brutal in the telling, but also incredibly sweet in it's ways - friends caring for those they love to the end and then carrying their memories with them afterward. The theme of remembrances and great loss is echoed in the reflections of a secondary character from the time of WWI, as well as those of the secondary storyline of 2015. As a reader I found the intimacy of the individual losses heartrending, but the building up of the loss of an entire community was daunting, depressing, enraging. It certainly hit home that everyone is just trying to live their own lives the best way they know how, hopefully able to seek some happiness and belonging, so it's all the more bewildering when events intervene to destroy the world you have created for yourself, to take those that matter most to you, and your own sense of safety and peace.

“She was struck by the selfish thought that this was not fair to her. That she’d been in the middle of a different story, one that had nothing to do with this. She was a person who was finding her daughter, making things right with her daughter, and there was no room in that story for the idiocy of extreme religion, the violence of men she’d never met. Just as she’d been in the middle of a story about divorce when the towers fell in New York City, throwing everyone’s careful plans to shit. Just as she’d once been in a story about raising her own brother, growing up with her brother in the city on their own, making it in the world, when the virus and the indifference of greedy men had steamrolled through. She thought of Nora, whose art and love were interrupted by assassination and war. Stupid men and their stupid violence, tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn’t you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot’s dick?”

The core storyline was tragic and endlessly engaging, and the others wrap around the primary, but some of the plot points for the 2015 storyline was somehow less successful to me. Makkai used a lot of real world events, so it's not that any of is really unbelievable, but the particulars around the character of Claire was at once a lot and underbaked. I don't know that I really cared much about any perceived flaws in the reading, but I think it just sticks out that there were some small elements that weren't as relevant (like why cult?...do we need cult?). I close this book with an undying love for Yale and Fiona, neither were without faults, but I just want hold/comfort Yale and have a drink with Fiona - beautiful characters.