Return to Barbary Lane.

Freeman, Chris

Michael Tolliver Lives

by Armistead Maupin

HarperCollins. 277 pages, $25.95

FANS of Armistead Maupin's magnificent "Tales of the City" series have a reading treat awaiting them. As the title of Maupin's new novel reveals, Michael Tolliver--"Mouse"--is alive. He's older (in his mid-fifties) and wiser, an HIV survivor who never expected to be one. And he's in love, having married Ben, a man who's "an entire adult younger" than he is, something he also never expected to do.

Maupin is as funny and irreverent as ever, and as relevant. The "Tales" books have always been political, having chronicled contemporary history through the lives of the quirky folks in and around 28 Barbary Lane, presided over by guru-landlady Anna Madrigal. Case in point: the fourth book in the series, Babycakes (1984), was one of the first novels to address AIDS directly, and the final books in the series showed the harrowing effects of the pandemic on the inhabitants of Barbary Lane and the City by the Bay. Maupin has always told his tales about everyday survival with wit, intelligence, and a dash of cultural criticism.

In 2001, Maupin's The Night Listener went in a new direction, depicting the breakdown of a long-term relationship and the complexities of a father-son bond. The book had a surreal quality but showed that Maupin is a writer who still has important things to say about relationships, especially in the wake of AIDS, and about the perils of surviving when you were sure you wouldn't.

So, it makes perfect sense (and great reading) that Maupin has returned to his fictional alter ego, Mouse, whose unexpectedly exciting and vital new life is unfolding, even as the remnants of his earlier life recede. Observers of gay representations in popular culture and the media often note the prevalence of a youth-oriented (obsessed?) culture. We live in a world, it seems, where there is no (gay) life after thirty. Recall, for instance, the suicidal behavior of the character Brian on Queer As Folk a few years back, as he tried to hang himself on his thirtieth birthday. Michael Tolliver Lives serves as a provocative corrective to that phenomenon. Like Christopher Isherwood's 58-year-old hero George in the gay classic A Single Man, Michael shows readers the realities of getting older and dealing with inevitable decline, but instead of feeling defeated and irrelevant, he seems to be sharper, smarter, and more grounded than ever. His story is never one of regret, though it does, of course, have occasional elements of nostalgia. The good old days at Barbary Lane were sweet, until they weren't.

Maupin opens the book with an epigraph from a conversation between Michael and Brian in their earliest incarnation--in The San Francisco Chronicle in 1976, the first year of Maupin's serialized newspaper column. They observe: "People like you and me ... we're gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists." What's great about this notion is its half-truth quality. Yes, Michael and some of the old timers do have a kind of residual 1970's bohemian world view, but they also don't quite know how to deal with kids these days. Aging baby-boomer Brian, Michael's best straight buddy from Barbary Lane, now has a twenty-something punk daughter, Shawna, who writes a blog called "Grrrl on the Loose" detailing her work as an exotic dancer and other juicy details, which her elders find a little disconcerting. As Michael says about Shawna, "our little grrrl is nothing if not modern."

Michael is aware and critical of his own prejudices and discomforts. Through his alter ego's anxieties and ambivalences, Maupin articulates multiple points of view about many controversial (or at least complicated) issues--monogamy, coupledom, gay marriage, intergenerational love, transsexuality, sex clubs, cruising on the Web, religious fundamentalism, and the like. In one particularly compelling scene, Michael relates the story of meeting a sexy young guy, Jake, at a local gay watering hole. Jake complains about the dating scene in the Castro: "The guys are either totally married or ordering each other like pizzas off the Internet. Or both." The more progressive Michael argues, "That's the great thing about the Web. You can ask for exactly what you need." Jake concurs, but notes, "I'd rather not ask the whole world if I can help it."

It turns out--spoiler alert here--that Jake is a transgendered FTM, and Michael's experience of sex with Jake reads like an honest reckoning with a politically well-intentioned man who knows how he should feel and what he should do, but who nevertheless is just a little freaked out. Maupin's candor in such moments makes Michael Tolliver Lives feel honest, absolutely contemporary, and culturally relevant. As octogenarian Anna Madrigal wisely advises Michael, "You don't have to keep up, dear. You just have to keep open."

Not surprisingly, the novel is also funny as hell. If you like Maupin's previous work, you'll be thrilled to revisit his San Francisco. It's just what you expect from him: family secrets, Christian hypocrisy, some dirty bits, all served up with laugh-out-loud humor.

Chris Freeman is co-editor of The Isherwood Century.