![]() ![]() ![]() “I have this scene where people are reminiscing about Boystown in the '80s,” she says as we walk past the Howard Brown Health clinic. ![]() I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved - and who now walk the long stormy summer." This quote also serves as the novel’s epigraph, and was a way for Makkai to connect the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s with the casualties of a different kind of war, decades later. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay, “My Generation,” in which he writes of men, like him, who came of age during World War I: "We were the great believers. While plenty of novels have explored the toll of HIV/AIDS on New York City and San Francisco, Makkai’s is the first to focus on the epidemic in Chicago. The Great Believers is the story of two Chicagoans, Fiona Marcus and Yale Tishman, whose lives are irrevocably changed by the AIDS crisis. It’s a warm Saturday afternoon, so doors and windows are flung open, people are laughing, and the streets are teeming with a sense of celebration.īut after reading Makkai's new novel, The Great Believers - a beautiful, epic, once-in-a-lifetime book that’s destined to become as synonymous with Boystown as Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street is with Pilsen - I’ll never be able to look at my adopted neighborhood with the same naïveté. When I walk down Halsted Street with Rebecca Makkai, Boystown feels like one giant block party. ![]()
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