Michael Tolliver Lives

Michael "Mouse" Tolliver, the HIV+ central character in Armistead Maupin's fabulous San Fran Tales of the City novels, is alive and well twenty years later in Maupin's fondly written new novel, Michael Tolliver Lives.

The book is described as a "stand alone" novel, which is curious. True, it's told from Michael's point of view, rather than from the third-person standpoint of the six earlier books. And, true, the new novel isn't as crazily plot-driven as the earlier novels, which relied on soapy devices, outlandish storylines, and the complicated criss-crossings of its little tribe of San Franciscans who lived, in the original series, at 28 Barbary Lane.

Moreover, much of the new book doesn't even take place in San Francisco; Michael and his husband--a younger man named Ben--are called away to Florida to attend to family business in the middle of the novel, and we learn considerably more than we knew from the earlier books about Michael's background, meeting his brother Irwin, his sister-in-law Lenore, and his obviously gay little nephew, Sumter. They're born-again Christians, who truly don't fathom Michael and Ben's marriage, but who do their best to love the "sinners" anyway, and receive them graciously.

Stand-alone novel or not, this is at its heart--and at its extremities too--a Tales of the City book. We may have jumped ahead about 18 years from the last novel, 1989's Sure of You, and the characters--and their beloved city--may have changed in that interim, but despite wrinkles, sagging flesh, and gray hair, these are the same characters that became dear to Bay Area readers through the serialized Tales of the City stories that were later edited into books that brought those same sweet spirits to readers worldwide and inspired three made-for-cable miniseries. I mean, where else could you read, and accept as perfectly natural, an exchange in which one character asks, "Have you seen my cock ring?," only to be answered, "In the soap dish"?

As with any other old friends not seen in a while, reintroductions have to be made, and the shock of certain details digested, before new adventures can be shared. Sure of you ended with the series' other central character, Mary Ann Singleton, moving on with her life and her career, and leaving her Barbary Lane family behind. At this point, so much water under has passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge that the simple fact that the gang is no longer all here is painless; there's a new gang, after all, with many of the same old players and a few new faces to boot. Our old friends now have new addresses, new jobs, new significant others: one or two old heartaches linger, but in many ways this book is less a continuation than a fresh, and self-contained, start.

Everyone has grown older; Maupin makes no apologies for this, though he does allow the occasional rueful reference to crop up. More to the point, aging has allowed these old characters to become new characters, to an extent, and Maupin revels in the opportunity to present them to us anew. There's an enormous amount of back-story that the book rests upon, but Maupin makes it easy for new readers to jump right in; the book might as well be a wholly fresh concoction without antecedent, with Maupin's breezy explanations catching you up on everyone's complicated histories in an amusing, but concise, manner.

Michael--no longer "Mouse," now, except to Shawna, the daughter of best friend Brian--has survived thanks to timely advances in managing HIV, and he enjoys his life the way a survivor of any other disaster or plague might, with a mixture of relief and apprehension. As he puts it, now that HIV doesn't necessarily mean you die in a few short years, you have the chance to grow old enough to die of other things. The contents of his medicine chest illustrate his point and speak poignantly of things he doesn't need to elaborate on; along with drugs to manage his cholesterol, there's a prescription for an anti-depressant.

But Michael and pals remain engaged in the battles of the day. It was Anita Bryant's anti-gay crusade in the late 1970s at one point, and the AIDS crisis later on, and now it's marriage equality and political apathy and the fear that if they ever try living somewhere else, the real estate market's dot-com driven prices--the only balloon from that boffo era in the 1990s that didn't come crashing back down again--will lock them out forever like a gate out of Eden swinging shut.

This urge to engage in the social and political issues of the time must be the driving force behind this return to Maupin's breakout literary stomping ground, because sentimentality certainly isn't enough to account for it (even though it must be said that Michael Tolliver Lives! brings the Tales of the City corpus to a much more satisfying close, if indeed a close it is, than Sure of you did). Why else contrive a trip from the beloved modern Sodom of the novels to the forbidding heart of Christendom for Michael and Ben? (Former flame Thack, we learned, packed up and left long ago: this, it turns out, was a decidedly good thing for Michael.)

Bryant may have disappeared from the scene, but her war cries (loud, oft-repeated, and insultingly absurd claims that gays "recruit" children, and that we are "human garbage") resonate today, filling the airwaves and selling commercial goods (and ideological hate) and Maupin clearly has decided that it's time to jump back into the fray; he's also evidently determined that laughter is still the most effective weapon in the pro-humanity arsenal, because while Michael makes frequent, and somewhat bitter, wisecracks about recent neocon causes c?l?bre, it's always with a wink and a campy, catty punch line.

The book's comic aspects carry the hallmark touches of Maupin's Tales of the City yarns; there are secrets (of the family sort; no cannibals or secret societies or fugitive mass murderers hiding out in the city park this time around) and there's plenty of herbal enjoyment going on (albeit of the smokeless "vaporizing" sort), and there's an absolute celebration of the broad, dazzling spectrum of human sexuality (Anna Madrigal is not only in fine form for a woman of 85, she's also surrounded now by a cadre of young trans-men and -women). Even Brian's daughter Shawna, now a Sex and the City-style columnist with appreciatively catholic erotic tastes, embodies a smoother, less troubled attitude toward sexuality (her formerly famously pussy-chasing father is less certain; he doesn't stand in her way, but he doesn't read her column, either).

Maupin, too, has refined his thinking and learned new tricks, or at least, new vocabulary. One of his post-Tales novels was a thriller called The Night Listener, in which a thinly disguised Maupin stand-in talks about his strange, but authentic, relationship with a young man he comes to regard as his "son"--a young man that, it turns out, never actually existed, but was the fabrication of his putative foster mother.

Now, Maupin turns that narrative device around and lets us see Michael wrestle with his mother's impending mortality, the long-suppressed secrets her imminent death shakes loose, and the consequences those secrets have for Michael's button-down born-again extended family. But when Michael finally expresses a heart-felt love and concern for his mother, it's not the blue-haired lady in a rest home in Florida he's talking about; it's a member of his "logical," rather than "biological," family.

We should all be so lucky as to have such loving, logical families; and perhaps we are: in revisiting Michael and the others, Maupin allows us to check in once more with characters who fill a need and, sometimes, point the way for so-called real life. Like all families, the 28 Barbary Lane crowd have their moments of pettiness, their unresolved disputes, their lost loved ones.

And, like most literature, the Tales of the City books--and I count this novel among them--are far from technically perfect, but they are books written with passion, and compassion, and understanding; they are emotionally perfect. This is a book for us, for all that straight fans will rejoice in it even as we do; Maupin was wise, and kind, to see that we still have a need for his imaginary family, our fictional kin, and to answer that need.