Madari Pendas

In an early scene of Rebecca Makkai’s new novel, The Great Believers, the protagonist Yale Tishman attends a memorial service for his friend Nico at the house of a mutual friend. Overwhelmed by the reality of Nico’s death and his emotional energy exhausted, he goes upstairs to rest. While resting, he has an imaginary moment in which he dreams that everyone from the party is gone. They are not in the basement, in the backyard or on the front lawn. The disappearance of his friends in such a quick sweep is a simulacrum of the AIDS epidemic that Yale and […]