The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
Published 2019 · 528 pages · 132,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Great Believers to read?
The Great Believers scores 54 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
- Makkai writes in clear, emotionally direct prose that captures both 1980s Chicago gay culture and contemporary Paris. The vocabulary is accessible, carrying grief and love without literary elaboration.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Sentences are controlled and readable, building emotional weight through accumulated detail rather than stylistic complexity. The prose has the fluency of a storyteller focused on character and feeling.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- The novel explores how communities survive catastrophe and how trauma echoes across generations. Yale's experience of the AIDS crisis shapes Fiona's relationships decades later in ways neither fully understands.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- 1980s Chicago art world, the AIDS epidemic's devastation, 1920s Paris through a discovered art collection, and contemporary family estrangement layer through the narrative. Makkai builds her world through accumulated period detail.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Two timelines—1985 Chicago and 2015 Paris—alternate, revealing connections between Yale's plague years and Fiona's search for her daughter. The reader must piece together how the past shaped the present.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The paintings Yale works to acquire become symbolic of art's persistence through destruction. Photographs become symbolic of documentation and memory. The count of the dead becomes symbolic of love measured in loss.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Makkai writes with tender proximity to her characters' grief, without ironic protection from their pain. The novel is sincere about loss and the ways people try to survive it.
- Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
- Both timelines reach provisional resolution—Yale's story ends in death, Fiona's in tentative family reconciliation. Makkai offers partial healing without claiming the wounds fully close.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- The novel alternates between two timelines thirty years apart, connected through Fiona's presence in both. The structure is accessible, building toward convergence as past illuminates present.
How The Great Believers is regarded
The Great Believers holds a literary regard score of 61 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.