Rebecca Makkai
Fleet
London
2019
515 pages
According to the Art:
I was drawn to this novel because it covers the early HIV / AIDS epidemic in Chicago, which is where I was at the time. I was not disappointed as far as that goes, and found it impossible not to draw comparisons between the novel and the current coronavirus pandemic.
Synopsis:
Rebecca Makkai’s novel tells the story of a dwindling collection of characters in alternating chapters across two time periods and locations: from 1985 through 1992 in Chicago, and during 2015 in Paris. The lead characters are among a group of young, gay men, and a few family members and friends who did not shun them.
The part of the story set in Chicago follows a group of gay men when AIDS was emerging as a mysterious disease claiming many of their lives. Yale Tishman is one of two key figures. He manages gifts and curates art for a university museum. We meet Yale when he is not infected and in a long-term relationship. Other gay men come into the story through his social circles and professional roles. They pursue different interests and careers, but the prospect of catching the disease haunts them all the same way. Many cannot evade the disease and eventually succumb to it.
Fiona is the other key figure. Her brother was in Yale’s group and had just died as the story opens. She stays close to his friends and helps many of them as they share her brother’s destiny and ultimately Yale’s, too. Fiona is the link between the story set Chicago and the story set in Paris years later. She is in Paris to find her estranged daughter who herself has a three-year-old daughter. The search turns up her daughter, but also a couple of the men she knew from her brother’s life who had escaped his fate. This part of the story also fills in details of what happened in Chicago, and reflects on the time from many years later.
Analysis:
Besides offering good story in its own right, the novel exposes the horror AIDS produced during the period covered. Particular themes about AIDS from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s are the dread, disappearance, and death pervading the gay community at the time.
Dread. All the characters in the novel express dread. They watch their community get infected and die at an alarming rate. They wonder if they will get infected, and if they do, will they die, and when will they die. “Look. We all have a death sentence. Right? You and me, we don’t know what that is. It’s a day, it’s fifty years,” says a friend of Yale’s. (p. 87) They see their friends suffer all kinds of terrible medical consequences HIV infection generates, and so their dread comes from all the possible ways AIDS could make them suffer. They wonder what AIDS has in store for them.
‘It’s like putting a quarter in the toy machine at the grocery store. You know the possibilities, but you have no idea what you’ll get. Like, will it be pneumonia, or Kaposi’s, or herpes, or what?’ He mimed opening one of the plastic balls. ‘Ooh, look, toxoplasmosis!’
p. 265
Their dread extended to how their last days could unfold, mostly fearing dying alone. When Yale was visiting a friend in the hospital, he knew he held a similar fate as this friend, and envisioned “this would be his final home, and the faces of those two passing nurses would, in time, be the ones he was most familiar with in the world. He would know every detail of this linoleum, every light fixture.” (p. 437) The novel also shows how this dread affected the career considerations, social behaviors, and long-term commitments. Dread would abate some in the mid-1990s for people with access to health care when effective drugs transformed AIDS into a chronic and manageable condition. The novel thus reifies the early history for people who came of age after the first decade and a half of the epidemic, which is a worthy endeavor in its own right.
Disappearance. As was the case for many people in or around gay communities during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, the characters in the novel begin to disappear as they succumb to the disease. After Yale experienced yet another death, he was “hit by the fact that this was another friend gone from his life. Nico was gone, Terrence was gone…and now Julian had gone off to curl up under a palm tree and die.” (p. 364) Lest we are to think that these rapture-like events are unique to the AIDS epidemic, Mekkai gives us the character, Nora, who recounts for Yale her experience from 1919 when artists and friends in her clique disappeared every day from war and flu.
You have to understand, we didn’t know who was alive or dead. …You’d find a friend in a café…and you’d exchange news about who was dead…. It was a ghost town. Some of those boys were dear friends…you know what, it prepared me for being old. All my friends are dying, or they’re dead already, but I’ve been through it before.
pp. 311-312
Before hearing Nora say this, Yale “couldn’t imagine going out and selecting a brand-new cohort.” But Makkai suggests humans adapt to such losses using Fiona’s reflection on her own losses thirty years before. Attending a photography show featuring photographs from that time, she sees pictures of people she lost and realizes, “How this show might begin to convey it all, the palimpsest that was her heart, the way things could be written over but never erased. She was simply never going to be a blank slate.” (p. 512)
Death and dying. The novel portrays the often gruesome nature of an AIDS death. The devastation HIV wreaks on the immune system leaves its victims vulnerable to a vast array of drawn-out torments and agonies. “Yale had first gotten pneumonia in the spring of 1990…Another issue followed, and another, until he joked that his body was a nightclub for opportunistic infections.” In thinking back, Fiona said, “I count it as two whole years that he was really sick.” In the end, “his kidneys went…and then it was his heart. He drowned.” (p. 479)
Makaii goes further to speculate on what goes through someone’s mind when dying from AIDS (or perhaps from any cause). She uses Fiona’s memory of something Yale told her he thought might happen.
He said, ‘And when I was a kid, I used to shut my eyes in the car when we were ten minutes from home. And then I tried to feel it, feel that last corner that was the driveway. I tried not to count the turns, just sense when we were home. And usually I could…and when I couldn’t breathe, I was doing it too, but—you know, with the end of things.’
p. 501
Covid, Covid, Covid. I was drawn to this novel because it covers the early HIV / AIDS epidemic in Chicago, which is where I was at the time. I worked in hospitals as gay men began appearing with odd infections and conditions most often related to severe immune deficiencies but without apparent cause. Indeed, one of the hospitals is mentioned in the novel. The streets, neighborhoods, parks, restaurants, drinking establishments, and clinics mentioned are places I knew and where I could often be found. As it is a particular interest of mine, I was curious about how well a literary novel could render the clinical and social aspects of AIDS then. I was not disappointed as far as that goes, and found it impossible not to draw comparisons between the novel and the current coronavirus pandemic.
The dread, disappearance, and death suffusing the gay community during the early years of the AIDS epidemic now suffuses society more broadly during the Covid pandemic. We wonder if we will get infected or whether it’s just a matter of time. A family visit for a celebratory occasion once the happiest prospect is now the source of worry and fear. Similar occasions are now also marked by the disappearance of friends and relatives Covid unexpectedly took, but not before causing considerable suffering. To be sure, AIDS during the time the novel covers struck a much narrower population, was more lethal, and caused more suffering. Society averted its gaze from the epidemic and risk groups—President Reagan didn’t mention the AIDS epidemic until 1985. In contrast, governments, private industry, and health care institutions around the world mounted immediate and massive economic and technological responses to Covid. Nevertheless, early AIDS experiences were to become prologue to the Covid pandemic forty years later.
Also:
The recent documentary film, 5B, and the memoir, Plague Years: A Doctor’s Journey through the AIDS Crisis are other sources featuring the themes of dread, disappearance, and death and dying AIDS generated. All were featured sources in an episode of the podcast, The Clinic & The Person. The author of the memoir, Dr. Ross Slotten, joined the podcast as a guest.
Makkai as a female author writing about male gay experience and AIDS is noteworthy, but should be left to literary scholars to consider how well she did. Her efforts struck me as highly credible.
Recognition:
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Finalist for the National Book Award
Winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal
Winner of the LA Times Book Prize
Winner of the Stonewall Award
New York Times Ten Best Books of 2018
