Enchanted Prose

Inspirational at any age (New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, California, 2005 to present): When a leading historian in the United States writes she was “born to paint,” we understand her need for creativity. That still doesn’t explain why at 64 an endowed professor at Princeton with an extensive list of accomplishments, awards, and honors would give all that up to become “An Artist.” Yet that’s exactly what Nell Irvin Painter did. Why?

For all the fascinating, artful, and enlightening aspects of Painter’s terrific memoir, her answer is fairly straightforward: because “she wanted to.”

The complete answer is a bit more complicated than that, but there’s great truth to the author’s inner passion and determination to lose herself in the “tactile sweetness” of the visual arts, quite different than her analytical career. Applying the same seriousness, curiosity, and discipline that led to her historian achievements, “intellectual sophistication” turned out to be a stinging obstacle the second time around.

For Painter, “creative ambition” seemed to have no bearing on becoming “An Artist” in the “Art World” (as opposed to thriving quietly in the world of art.) The Art World translates into getting noticed at galleries and museums, causing collectors to crave your work. Getting noticed, her art teachers deemed, was something “you’re born with.”

They told her she’d “never be an artist,” a stunning rebuke to someone whose seen the benefits of scholarship, hard work, practice, persistence. Here Painter’s deeply personal memoir expands philosophically, challenging “ontology or epistemology?” In this layman’s mind, likened to the Nature versus Nurture psychological dispute.

“Who defines what constitutes “An Artist”? the author asks, examines, adjusts to, and strives for in defiance of the 21^st century Art World, at odds with her “twentieth century eyes.”

As you get to know Nell Painter through her intimate memoir, it becomes crystal-clear that dabbling on her own in the visual arts was not an option; jumping all in her only authentic choice. “After a lifetime of historical truth and political engagement with American society,” she became driven to express visually her perspectives on “the state of the world and about history” not just for the sheer joy of it but to be heard.

It’s important to point out that Painter had a fantastic role model for reinventing herself: at 65, her mother, Dona Irvin, spent ten years researching and writing her first book (The Unsung Heart of Black America), and at 75 devoted another ten writing her memoir (Wish I Could Look That Good When I’m That Old: An Older African-American Speaks to All Women in All of America.)

So the artist-striving historian plunges into art classes and art schools (and later residences) with remarkable youthful zest, mighty aspirations, a supportive husband (Glenn teaches at Rutgers University), and the means to do so.

The visual arts was not an entirely foreign notion. In the ’60s, the author lived in Ghana where she fell in love with colors: “a humid world of tropical contrasts and color-wheels.” Vibrant colors match her vibrant spirit, which is why her gray period at graduate arts school was so unsettling and compelling to the reader (see why below).

The author’s parents moved to California, where she experimented with sculpture as an undergraduate anthropology major at Berkeley. Later, her love of drawing, “of really seeing what I was looking at,” finds its way into some of her seven lauded books on what it means to be black and white in America. These include: Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol; Creating Black Americans: African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present; and The History of White People she finished while juggling the pressures of graduate art school – which she came to view as “man’s inhumanity to man” – at a wrenching emotional period when her mother was dying and her father was chronically, clinically depressed.

Even before Painter left Princeton, she had a plan, taking two painting classes there. Followed by an intensive summer at the New York Studio School in Manhattan drawing and painting, a tiring commute (leaving her beloved home in the multi-cultural Ironbound district of Newark at 6am, returning at night). Yet this “marathon” delights and stirs her creative soul. Unlike her undergraduate and graduate art experiences, which were painfully humbling.

At the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, a student bluntly asked how old she was. It was the first time Painter had thought of herself as old. She’d already spent a lifetime fighting two other labels: being black and a woman in America. Not seeing herself as old until then speaks volumes about how progressive those 20^th century eyes are.

Painter presses on. Rejected by her top graduate choice, Yale’s School of Art, she moved solo to Providence to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, RISD, her second preference. Here she soon found herself profoundly alone, marginalized and discriminated on account of age, sex, ethnicity, intellectualism, and purposefulness to incorporate “history history” into her art.

Painter approached RISD with the same fire in her belly as ever, but over time the outrageous lack of respect for who she was as a human being, and a person of exceptional productivity and credentials, and of course her art wore her down.

The historian-turned-artist does not mince words. Candidly and sharply, and sometimes profanely, she describes how badly RISD demoralized her. This shocks the reader, since we perceive Painter as wonderfully confident. “I was a star and a dud, simultaneously,” she asserts.

We don’t agree. To us she’s a shining star whose starred memoir treats us to absorbing discussions on the concepts, techniques, materials, and historical contexts of Painter’s Artmaking, engaging us through colorful prose and images of her work that accentuate the 320+ pages. That’s a total of 95 pictures, provided in a List of Images Appendix. These pale in comparison to the whole body of the artist’s contemporary works.

The range, conceptualism, and activism of these cutting-edge creations include: charcoal drawings, paintings, collages, silkscreen prints, woodcuts, lithographs, linoleum cuts, silhouettes, and something Painter landed on she calls “manual + digital:”

“Using found images and digital manipulation, I reconfigure the past and revision myself through self-portraits,” relishing the “freedom to be totally self-centered,” exploring where she fits in the world. … “Race the exhausting, existential reality of any black artist becoming known in America.”

Race is never far from her bold compositions and focus, intensified by her conclusion that “the Art World is as racist as hell and unashamed of it.”

All the more noteworthy then is the artist’s exuberance for everything involved in making art. From “the paper, the charcoal, the canvas, the setups, the model, the perspective, the shadows, the colors, the smell.” Everything except succumbing to caring about how others judged her work and looked down at her. When the “sacred” graduate art school “crits” failed to take her seriously, she eventually sought advice on the outside from art friends and colleagues, which buoyed her.

Since you can’t take the historian out of the artist, Old in Art School is also an art history primer on artists Painter admires. Most are modern, abstract expressionists and black artists, but by no means all of them.

Nell Irvin Painter’s art journey is an impressive uphill battle to be noticed. All you have to do is scroll through this website – http://www.nellpainter.com/art.html#beamerica – to appreciate how buzz worthy her artwork is. Just what the Art World is looking for! And she did it her way.

Painter’s mother was her inspiration. Now she’s ours.

Lorraine

Solving a crime of betrayal (New Hampshire, present-day): Michele Campbell was a NYC Federal prosecutor for eight years before she turned to writing murder mysteries. She Was the Quiet One, her second crime novel (It’s Always the Husband, 2017), opens with the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl who is a twin. Does the taunting title suggest the quieter sister committed the crime? Or, was she the victim?

While it doesn’t take too long to identify the quiet one, it’s not until the end of Part I, as in quite a while, that you’ll know which sister was killed.  Does that mean her twin is the guilty one?

The author’s investigatory chops shine and enhance the suspense as she lays out, one by one, evidence regarding persons of interest. Though one of the sisters is at the center of the investigation, we’re not so gullible to think we’ve solved the mystery early on. So we read like a member of a jury whose job is to pay close attention to the testimony of the witnesses, and to the storylines about witnesses and other characters, doing our due diligence to put aside preconceived notions.

Transcripts of police interrogations show Campbell is adept at transferring her detective prowess into first-rate literary skills.

Interviews follow a pattern in which characters who knew the girls cough up something suggestive despite being quite guarded about saying much about the sisters and what went on at a very vulnerable time in their lives. The interviews, conducted by a State and a local law enforcement officer, are written in what feels like realistic police procedural dialogue. These either precede or follow chapters that are character storylines, which provide clues as to others who might have committed the crime. This non-linear approach is extremely effective. The opening investigation tells us about a murder that occurred in the middle of the book, and then we read about events that happened before or after later interrogations, also discussed in the detective interviews. These add up to a list of possible culprits beyond the quiet one.

Two mysteries then. Which sister was killed? Who did it?

Let’s start with Bel and Rose, the twins. Different as night and day. Bel is an undisciplined, blond knock-out; Rose a follow-the-rules, nerdy type. What they have in common is they’re orphans. Their father died when they were young; their bohemian mother just passed away. Forced to leave their home in California, they’re sent to live with their grandmother on her Connecticut estate, another emotional jolt. Grandma comes across as a cold-hearted, wealthy woman with a family legacy of alumnus who attended an elite private boarding school in New Hampshire: Odell Academy. (New England has the greatest number of prestigious boarding schools in the country). With the assistance of grandma’s loathsome attorney/boyfriend, Bel and Rose are shipped off to New Hampshire, another trauma.

Both are assigned to Moreland Hall, described as “gorgeous, like something out of a fairy tale. Ivory-covered brick and stone, Gothic arches, ancient windows with panes of wavy glass.” It’s a spread-out campus that borders a “thousand acre nature preserve” with a lake. Lost Lake is where the body of either Bel or Rose was discovered. Depending on the time of day and the constantly changing weather, this fairy-tale can look downright eerie. A perfect setting for a murder.

As for witnesses/other persons of interest, two are the sisters’ advisors, also their dorm heads and teachers. Sarah and Heath are married with two young children; they too are Odell alumni. Sarah is Rose’s advisor and math teacher, one of many subjects go-getter student Rose immerses herself in. Rose also babysits for the couple giving her a birds-eye-view of this family. Heath, then, is Bel’s advisor, also her English teacher. Sarah is a hard-working, plain Jane like Rose so they’re a fine match. In fact, Sarah is a better motherly fit than Rose’s artsy mother, who was much closer to unconventional Bel. As Bel’s attraction to a nasty crowd of senior girls is seen upon arrival – the onset of a rift between the two sisters – you can’t help but think Bel might have benefited from someone like Sarah to steady her.

Similarly, it wouldn’t have hurt Rose to have been paired with Heath. With his “movie-star” grin, he’s way too handsome for his own good cloistered with cliquish, mean-spirited, uppity, rich students used to manipulating and getting away with everything. Darcy and Tessa are the ringleaders (also suspects); Darcy’s boyfriend Brandon, a follower, becomes one too. Putting teaching credentials aside, Sarah and Heath have been (newly) brought in to improve the school’s naughty image.

Bel and Rose enter Odell at the beginning of the school year as sophomores, a distinct disadvantage. Raw over the recent death of their mother, abandoned again this time by their grandmother, they need each other more than ever. Yet each deals with loss in their own way, healthy and not.

On their very first day at Odell an incident occurs in the lunchroom that separates the sisters, foretelling the downward spiral of their relationship, testing the limits of the bond of sisterhood, playing into the plot. Could one hate the other so much she’d go to such extremes to kill the other? Perhaps, because the tension does get ugly. But Odell has had its share of scandals before.

Chapters alternate between what’s going on at Moreland versus investigating the murder from multiple perspectives. Many voices help us piece together bits and pieces to form judgments.

The first witness is Emma Kin, Bel’s roommate. (Another unfortunate pairing as Emma and Rose are well-matched for each other; become good friends.) Emma provides just enough information to glean Campbell’s provocative title might be intentionally misleading. She mentions some kind of an “attack” that “caused the most serious breach between them [Bel and Rose].” Her testimony signals to the police, and to us, the need to delve into what advisor Sarah knows. Sarah is the second witness questioned. She raises more suspicions.

As do others, including Rose’s former roommate who abruptly left the school causing shock waves; and Zach, who pines for Bel, then suddenly befriends Rose. Also reluctant to talk, he manages to confirm Darcy and Tessa “have no shame, no limits”; he also refers to big Brandon who intimidates.

As you weigh testimonies and narratives, you’re deciding who can be trusted. What stands out is how the author crafts their voices to let us see into their mindsets, their possible motives.

The language of the troublemakers is harsh. “People were malicious. They enjoyed inflicting pain,” Sarah says.

This so-called exclusive campus is indeed a secluded place. Replete with online bullying, stalking, harassment, “gossip traveled like fire in the wind,” leading and misleading us.

New England’s weather is another effective literary tool creating a spooky mood like music does for a scary movie. “Snow tasted of cold, bitter air, and the campus felt desolate, with the wind sweeping across the plaza, and the lights of the library disappearing in the white gusts.” Fog imagery channels dangers that lurk.

At the start of Part II, we know which sister’s life has been tragically cut short. The picture isn’t pretty. Neither is the school’s culture, except for those who seek to save it.

Lorraine

Figuring out a something-gone-wrong love story (Cotswolds, England and LA, present-day): Ghosting as it applies to relationships is on the rise due to social media. According to the Urban Dictionary, to be ghosted means “someone you love disappears without explanation.”

The verb ghosted is of course the title of this romantically suspenseful, contemporary novel – and the plot. British author Rosie Walsh’s terrific literary sleight-of-hand debut uses techniques that guide our assumptions, but things are not always what they seem.

Sarah is the one ghosted. Eddie did the ghosting.

The reader’s head is wrapped around two burning questions: Why did he disappear after they’d just spent seven deliriously happy days falling madly in love? Sarah is convinced something awful happened to him. Her girlfriends presume this is just the way men behave, jilted themselves. Best friend Tommy’s not so sure.

Sarah, soon-to-be divorced, and single Eddie are both approaching forty, so when they serendipitously meet along a peaceful country road in England’s picturesque Cotswolds, spend seven love-struck days together and come away each believing they’d met the one, we believe them.

Some evidence: on the eighth day, Eddie seems genuinely bummed out that he has to leave Sarah for a planned week of surfing in Spain with a friend. His desire to cancel the trip not to lose a minute with Sarah before she returns to LA, where she now lives, feels heartfelt too. Sarah insists he go, agreeing to meet back at the airport upon his return. Eddie professes, also seemingly truthful, that “this has been the best week of my life,” echoing Sarah’s feelings. Too good to be true? Because he never shows up. Initial thought: a surfing accident?

It’s natural Sarah might expect Eddie to have called before he boarded the plane. And it wasn’t unreasonable for her to be glued to her phone constantly checking for an email, a text, a Facebook message while he was gone. We relate to her growing worry not hearing a word from him, as if he’d been a ghost. Surreal and heartbreaking for someone who already had her heart broken years ago.

We’ve been primed to feel the emotional toll of being ghosted on page one. An epilogue of sorts delivered in a letter, one of many that pop up throughout. Some like this leading one are addressed to Dear You, signed by Me: “It’s exactly nineteen years since that luminous morning when we smiled and said goodbye,” it begins, ending with “I will never stop looking for you.” Presumably never sent. A journal entry to cope with the “pain of love” and the “loss of self it precipitates”?

The sender’s sorrowful voice must be Sarah’s, who proceeds to fill us in on those seven love-infused days, starting with Day Seven: When We Both Knew. Alternating chapters introduce a woman flabbergasted by her weakness having found the strength to reconstruct her shattered life. How could “a woman who’d traveled the world, survived a tragedy, run a charity” let herself fall apart again?

We intuit from the get-go (page five) that the tragedy cited involved her younger “sunbeam of a sister” Hannah, related to a fuzzy reference to an accident during Sarah’s teen years when they grew up in England’s countryside in one of those picture-postcard Cotswold villages, Frampton Mansell.

Brian Robert Marshall / Cottages in Frampton Mansell
via Wikimedia Commons

Sarah’s parents still live in the village (her grandfather a few hours away), so every June she comes back to visit them. She breathes in its “smell of warm grass,” wildflowers, peacefulness, which Walsh beautifully breathes into her prose. But everywhere she goes she also breathes in the sweetness and innocence of Hannah’s memories. That’s why after the mysterious accident, Sarah fled to LA. More mysteries. What happened to Hannah whose memories haunt Sarah?

It’s on a recent June visit, around the time of the Brexit referendum (2016), that Sarah meets Eddie.

The charity portion of Sarah’s bio is significant as it relates to another type of all-powerful love and loss: motherhood. Co-founded with her husband of seventeen years, Clown Doctors use specially trained performers to comfort sick, fearful hospitalized children. Sarah couldn’t, wouldn’t bring a child into their marriage (the cause of the rift) believing she doesn’t deserve to.

Did you know there’s a real Dr. Patch Adams? (We miss you Robin Williams.) Sarah’s charity is inspired by the one founded twenty-some years ago in New York, spreading to the UK and around the globe.

When Sarah meets Eddie a mile from her childhood home, we understand her immediate reaction: “What a relief to talk to someone who knew nothing of the sadness I was meant to be suffering.” Doesn’t take long for her to see him as an “ebullient, handsome man, sweeping into a part of the world I’d come to dread, painting everything in bright colors.”

Much of their days are tucked away in Eddie’s wooden barn (a carpenter, he loves wood). Days so full of “the lightness, the ease, the laughter” Sarah doesn’t dare mess up by telling him why she left a nature’s paradise. A terrible omission.

To be fair, there’s something Eddie hasn’t told her either. His truth blindsided me, not because Sarah is an unreliable narrator, rather, she was blindsided too. When you don’t see this bombshell coming, you get so engrossed like I did, missing my morning coffee ritual, reading straight through to noon! There’s more than one bombshell, but the first one makes you realize you’d assumed too much. At that tipping point, about half-way through, you cannot put this book down, in step with frenzied Sarah.

Since Sarah and Eddie have hidden some crucial things, I can’t share more about their storylines without spoiling the surprises. What I can say is more about Sarah’s amazing friendships. Without them, who knows how she would have fared.

Tommy from childhood was a victim of bullying in school. Sarah consoled and looked out for him whenever he’d “cry, again and again and again,” similar to how she fiercely protected her sister and watched over her sister’s friend Alex, often hanging out with them. It’s Tommy’s house Sarah rushes to in that distressing week waiting for Eddie; Jo, close friends with both, is there too. Jo’s precocious son provides the devoted-to-motherhood theme, which also plays out when Sarah returns to LA and bares her soul with caring friend and assistant Jenni very depressed at learning another fertility treatment failed. Yet she “postponed her own grief so she could look after mine.” Special friendships, a special kind of love.

Walsh, a former documentary producer who grew up in the Cotswolds, has produced a stirring novel you can picture as a film you’d want to see. You read the blurbs, thought you knew what it was going to be about. You’re partly right until it’s nothing like you’d imagined.

Lorraine

Can someone who doesn’t like people find love? (York, England 2016; 2013 and 1999 backstories): “I don’t love much, but I love words,” says Loveday Cardew, the central character in The Lost for Words Bookshop. Loveday. What a cynical name for an antisocial character who has sequestered herself in a used bookshop in northeast England, working there for the past ten years.

The charming British bookshop on the cover of Stephanie Butland’s latest novel is “full of stories that are, potentially, at least as painful as yours,” Loveday signals in her diary-like voice. Since she’s lost for words around people, we pay attention to the clues she offers. These reveal why a twenty-five-old woman is excruciatingly cautious of and withdrawn from people. Something or someone has hurt her badly. So don’t be fooled by her snarky prose. I found myself tearing up five times.

Loveday wants us to believe she’s unlovable reflecting how she perceives herself: a “sulky, emo-goth” who’s “incapable of sensible human interaction.” Once we start piecing together the roots of her anger, distrust, and forlornness, she’s still not warm and fuzzy but our hearts go out to her and wonder how we’d have turned out. In fact, she dares us to do just that: “Do I sound jaded? Well, let’s swap places and see how you do.” Thank goodness we don’t have to in the real world.

There is one person Loveday does like: Archie, her colorful, avuncular boss and “only real friend,” the softest, most generous soul. Everyone needs an Archie in their life, who does so much for you without your even knowing it. Lovable to the core. Archie cares deeply about Loveday, but she’s too broken to fully appreciate he does until her tightly controlled world unravels.

Archie does what Archie does best: befriend everyone. He lets Loveday run his bookshop because books are her life; she in turn white-glove handles every book she touches, researches, shelves, and handsells in this “higgledy-piggledy” walled shop and online. Don’t expect her to be on Facebook, though, because “there’s enough people to contend with in real life without adding virtual ones.”

Loveday’s sustenance for books literally goes skin deep. Her prickly skin is inked with tattoos marking favorite lines of adult and children’s books that contain secret meanings.

Naturally, Loveday is not at all pleased when she discovers a book on the ground near a trash bin. A book of poems. “Poetry has a difficult enough time without people throwing it away,” she grumbles, taking it personally since she writes poems secluded in her bedsit – one of many British words, references, slang you’ll encounter. That term you know, others you’ll guess at, some maybe google.

Like I did about the poetry book Loveday found: Grinning Jack. Written by Brian Patten, one of three influential Liverpool poets from the sixties who put performance poetry – the spoken word movement – on the UK literary map.

Poetry is making a comeback – both written words and spoken words performed for an audience. So the poetry book is part of a poetry storyline.

The gist of the poetry plotline: Loveday posts a note on the bookshop’s window hoping a passerby will claim the book. A week later someone even Archie doesn’t know walks in to reclaim it. Archie warns him Loveday “doesn’t approve of people who aren’t good to books.” Nathan Avebury, put together too well for Loveday’s taste – a leather-coat and “metallic-blue” ankle boots – is undeterred. Strike two: he’s confident, though secretly she wishes she was.

The “beautiful, ramshackle, home-away-from home” bookshop has an old-fashioned letterbox drop. After Nathan left, Loveday spots a notice sliding out of it about a Wednesday night poetry slam at the George and Dragon, a two-hundred-year-old community pub in the Yorkshire Dales countryside.

The invite was meant for Loveday. For someone who doesn’t give people a chance, who recognizes “getting to know me is an exercise in faith rewarded,” venturing out to the poetry event is a huge deal. Initially put off by Nathan, Loveday starts to warm up with him, observing “his eyes were the kind of blue you find on self-help covers, to suggest clarity and calm.” Yes, a romance is brewing but in a novel of twists and turns things don’t go smoothly. Nathan earns his living as a magician. Magic is certainly needed to reach Loveday.

A second plotline explains Nathan’s challenges: Loveday, who assesses every book donation, mentally registers but doesn’t think much of at first three boxes anonymously dropped off one by one. Since she’s always on guard, she becomes suspicious and then unglued when there’s too many coincidences in the boxes tied to her childhood. Who must know about her past?

A past revealed over many chapters and two timelines, while the mystery donor is not unveiled until the end.

Chapters are cleverly named and sorted by literary genre. Nathan’s 2016 present is found in the Poetry sections. History chapters, set three years earlier, center around an ex-boyfriend, presumably her only one, a relationship that devolved into a bad, haunting experience. Crime chapters take place during her childhood. These make clear how Loveday came to be the way she is. Once she was a happy, adjusted girl with fond memories of books and living along the North Yorkshire Heritage Coast in Whitby.

At a poetry performance, Nathan tells Loveday “my sister’s beautiful too.” Of course, she’s stunned he said too. She’s not someone who looks people in the eye, but with Nathan she can’t help it. “I don’t gaze,” but that’s exactly what she can’t stop doing. Still, if she’ll ever break out of her hardened shell, Nathan will need much fortitude, sensitivity, and love. Nathan is the other character we should all have in our corner.

Poems meant for performance and insight are sprinkled throughout. The poem Loveday watched Nathan perform when she bravely walked into his poetry world ended with: “Next time you leave something behind, you might have just begun a whole new adventure.” Loveday and Nathan do; so will you.

Not very surprising, the author describes herself as an “occasional performance poet.” She also trains people in creative thinking, and lives by the north England sea. A terrific combination for a novelist whose created a twisty plot involving printed and spoken words.

“Some plot twists,” Loveday says, “you don’t recover from them.” Will Loveday?

Lorraine

Affirming lives lost to HIV/AIDS in the early years of the crisis and the survivors who loved and cared for them (Boystown, Chicago 1985 to 1992; Paris 2015): While writing this, I’m listening to Simon and Garfunkel harmonizing America in Central Park, 1981. It was Nico’s favorite song, the pivotal character in The Great Believers whose death from HIV/AIDS in 1985, when Rebecca Makkai’s brilliant third novel opens, changes the lives of her two main characters – Yale and Fiona – forever.

Brilliant is not a word to use lightly. But I keep coming back to it. Here’s why:

Nico’s searching-for-America song about lovers who felt empty and aching expresses much of the poignant, soulful tone of the novel.

Timelines matter historically and fictionally. The year 1985 reflects well-conceived historical time markers when Chicago’s Boystown – America’s first openly accepted gay village – was not yet a “graveyard” like San Francisco and New York. Gay (and lesbian, men the first infected so the focus) bars and discos felt “safer, and happier.” That’s before the “slow-motion tsunamis from both coasts” hit.

Art, which binds the plotting and gives it beauty, was supposed to be the main theme, AIDS secondary. But after the author interviewed those who “lived through all this and sat down to coffee or let me into their homes or emailed with me endlessly, in many cases with personal and traumatic things,” she says in her Author’s Notes and Acknowledgements,” it took over, giving voice “to the memories of the amazing men you all told me about.”

On the surface, The Great Believers may seem too depressing to read if you’re looking to escape an historical crisis assaulting human rights, discrimination, chaos, misinformation, fear. Actually, these familiar realties draw you in. Makkai is not afraid to tell it like it was, quite graphically at times, but she does so with great compassion and understanding, breaking stereotypes and finding silver linings. When love is “the point of everything” we empathize with those who suffered.

Her prose is crafted with precision, strategically connecting characters over thirty years, making us feel connected by six degrees of separation, or less.

Brilliant balancing lives cut short leaving holes in the hearts left behind, reminding us true Love and Art are everlasting.

Nico’s death haunts Yale and Fiona. Both of their storylines involve art, Yale’s more substantially. Yale’s chapters are all-consuming, Fiona’s come thirty years later. Nico was Yale’s first friend when he moved to Chicago. Never lovers, these two gay men bonded over their mutual passion for art. Fiona is Nico’s sister; she disowned her parents when they disowned him. She mothered Nico like she does Yale, estranged from his actress mother, abandoned at three. “Being touched was Yale’s weakness,” sad and significant.

The leap from Chicago in the ‘80s and ‘90s to Paris 2015 feels uninterrupted. Fiona, almost sixty, still mourning Nico, flees to the City of Love believing her daughter, Claire, now a mother, may be there. She hasn’t seen or heard from her in three years since she headed to Colorado to join a cult. Fictionally, the cruel timing of Claire’s birth drives home the enormous, long-term emotional toll AIDS took on Fiona’s family. Paris is a smart setting for the artistic theme, and because “everything about AIDS had been better all along in France … Less shame, more education, more funding, more research.”

The opening line begins with Nico’s funeral happening twenty miles from Nico’s lover Terrence, Fiona, and friends. Instead, everyone that matters is headed to a “forced festivity” Nico insisted on. These are Yale’s and Fiona’s friends too. “All overachievers,” Yale tells us later, as they “seemed to be overachieving in this terrible, new way too.”

The celebration is being hosted at Richard’s house. Fifteen years older than his guests, he’s a gay photographer always hanging around capturing their lives. It’s his Paris home, shared with his lover, that Fiona is staying at. Richard is now famous, readying for a noteworthy exhibition of his photographic art documenting the AIDS epidemic, which means Fiona’s past merges with the present.

Also in 1985: Ryan White, a brave teenager with a blood disorder was denied admission to middle school. He called international attention to how the virus also spread. His activism helped turn the tide. His name appears in the novel. So does Rock Hudson’s, the handsome, wasted-away actor who died in 1985, succumbing to the disease he’d hidden from his adoring public. Still, it took two more years for Ronald Reagan to acknowledge the crisis. He’s here too, along with the growing anger towards his administration’s inaction. Though this was also the year when the FDA approved a blood test for HIV/AIDS, the test Nico took.

Not everyone did. Infected meant you’d die back then (100 drugs are available today, making the dreaded diagnosis not the seal of death). Yale is torn up about the blood screening. Who wants to know you’re going to die soon? What about one’s moral obligation to know so you don’t infect others?

It takes 100 of 400+ pages to detail 1985 to 1986. Nico’s death comes at the same time Yale’s art career as development director of a fictional new gallery at Northwestern University, the Briggs, is taking off. (The Block art museum is the real one.) It may be one of the few places the Chicago author invents, perhaps because she teaches creative writing there. Real places and real events are planted throughout; the rest fictional.

Fiona’s Paris is also intertwined in Yale’s story: Nora, ninety years old, a former artist’s muse and artist herself in Paris before and soon after WWI, has chosen Yale to navigate and curate her beloved art collection she wants to bequeath to the Briggs against her family’s desires. The collection comprises sketches, drawings, and paintings by Italian, French, Russian, Bulgarian, and Japanese artists such as Modigliani, Hébuterne, Soutine, Pascin, Foujita, and a total unknown, Ranko Novak. You won’t have to wait too long to find out why she picked Yale; Ranko’s mystery intriguingly stretches out.

Yale is kind, diplomatic, and very good at what he does. Nora now lives in Wisconsin, so he travels often (with several Briggs characters) to negotiate this delicate transaction. The collection has to be authenticated and valued. It could be worth two million or more, putting the Briggs on the map and cinching Yale’s career. As Nora’s backstory is disclosed little by little, Yale becomes committed to carrying out her specific wishes. Nora is dying, so his travails and sacrifices add more suspense. We’re already turning pages to see what happens to Yale’s health.

Meanwhile, Yale is also dealing with his obsessively possessive, long-time lover, Charlie, an activist who runs a fictitious gay newspaper inspired by real ones.

Makkai’s gay characters come from Cuban, Jewish, Mormon, white, and black heritages. Besides creative careers, others include philosophy and law. Nora, on the other hand, works at a resale shop that provides funds to the Howard Brown health center, which established Chicago’s AIDS hotline, notably in 1985. Founded by gay medical students, it’s one of our largest LGBTQ organizations, providing “life-affirming” care.

The Great Believers affirms life too, by affirming lives lost and the survivors who loved and cared for them.

Lorraine