A memorial to a horrendous time in the gay community: The Great Believers

About halfway through Rebecca Makkai's novel The Great Believers (2018), which, as noted previously, consists of 2 parallel plots set 30 years apart w/ one overlapping character (Fiona, whose brother's funeral after his death from AIDS is the kick-off for the first plot and who is the central character - in search of her absconded daughter - in the 2nd). What really strikes me as I read deeper into the novel is that know nothing of the fate of the main character (actually, of the 3 main characters) in the 1985 section; Fiona must know what happened to Yale, Charlie, and Julian - did they survive the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s or not? - but Makkai has carefully crafted the novel to keep us in suspense about the outcome and later life of these characters. Good for her - it's not easy to balance two time-separated plots w/out giving everything away and deflating the tension. The first (1985/6) plot is quite impressive as it gradually becomes apparent to us that this is a memorial for a time that was horrendous for the gay community (this novel focuses on the gay community in Chicago), with what seemed at first like an aberrant death quickly becoming a ravaging epidemic, when every gay man had to take stock of his life and when funerals and rapid declines to death affected everyone - particularly tragic in that these young men so afflicted were part of a vibrant, artistic, intellectual community, suddenly becoming eradicated by disease. In some narratives, death can be a cheap convention, a way to "wrap up" a plot or dispose of a tangential character; here death is central and omnipresent, much as in a novel of war. Makkai focuses on the brief and most terrifying moment in time when it was clear that AIDS was devastating male homosexuals yet there was no cure and, among many, not much information about prevention - in fact, there was much misinformation about contagion, as Makkai dramatizes in a powerful scene at which a homophobe refuses to allow a gay man to use the bathroom - my children use this bathroom, the man says. He's hateful of course - but the knowledge about the disease at that time was so sparse and suspicious that his action was probably typical of many unpleasant encounters at that time.