Review by New York Times Review
IN THE MID-1970S, the managing editor of The San Francisco Chronicle kept a chart in his office with two columns: "heterosexual" and "homosexual." Whenever a new character appeared in "Tales of the City" - the newspaper's fiction serial by Armistead Maupin, which begat a stack of popular novels - the name was slotted accordingly. "He was making sure that the gay characters didn't overtake the straight characters and thereby undermine civilization," Maupin recalled in 2012, during an appearance at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. The chart didn't last. (When Maupin insisted on filing Faust, the series's randy Great Dane, under "heterosexual," his editor scrapped it.) Yet "Tales of the City" endured. Maupin's novels followed the same bohemian tribe from the sexual revolution of the '70s through the AIDS epidemic of the '80s and then, after an 18-year hiatus, into a postmillennial San Francisco reshaped by the tech industry. Along the way, Maupin earned the ire of antigay conservatives - in 1994, a "Tales" mini-series was condemned by lawmakers on the floors of the Georgia, Oklahoma and South Carolina legislatures. He also gained an international cult following. The series's ninth and final novel, "The Days of Anna Madrigal," arrives this week. It spotlights one of Maupin's most beloved characters: the spliff-smoking, wisecracking transgender landlady who presided over 28 Barbary Lane through most of "Tales." Her tenants became a sort of "logical" - rather than "biological" - family. When the novel opens, Anna, 92, can't even light a candle without her younger roommate, the transgender gardener Jake Greenleaf, fretting she'll fall asleep and burn the house down. When Jake stops Anna from accidentally incinerating the LED candle he bought to appease her, she intones, "I have bade farewell to flame." Making "such small surrenders" with dignity is part of what Anna calls "leaving like a lady." The other part? Traveling back to Winnemucca, Nev., where Andy Ramsey - Anna as a child - lived at the Blue Moon Lodge, his mother's brothel. There he guarded secrets: a yellow chiffon dress hidden in his room, a penchant for twirling and a crush on the Basque boy who worked at Eagle Drugs. "The Days of Anna Madrigal" is a genial fable. Like the earlier "Tales," it's riddled with outlandish coincidences and best enjoyed under the willing suspension of disbelief. Told in Maupin's roving style - call it third-person kaleidoscope - the narrative braids Anna's story, childhood flashbacks and scenes of her adopted kin, many of whom are preparing to attend Burning Man. They include Brian, a Winnebago-dwelling wanderer and one of Anna's former tenants; his daughter, Shawna, a sex blogger turned best-selling novelist; and Michael and Ben, a married couple navigating a 20-year age gap. There's also Mary Ann Singleton, the Cleveland-to-San Francisco transplant whose imagined misadventures were the genesis of "Tales." Here she makes herself a target for Burning Man's version of class warfare by camping in a luxuriously appointed R.V. It's fitting that Maupin wraps up "Tales" in the Nevada desert, at a festival that started in San Francisco and was later exiled. (In 1989, Burning Man's climactic fire grew too big for Baker Beach, prompting a swift eviction.) The fringe, it seems, is always moving outward. If "Tales" started afresh today, Maupin's characters might live in Oakland; instead of visiting bathhouses, they'd be blocking Google bus routes. The author himself has already moved on. In 2012, he sold his Parnassus Heights craftsman and decamped to Santa Fe. Without giving away the finale, Anna's past and present never really collide in ways the reader might expect. Time keeps propelling the characters forward, with no ultimate victory to be had. There are echoes of an earlier scene: Jake is playing Angry Birds. Anna wants to know if he's winning. Jake explains patiently that it's not the kind of game you win. "No, you don't," Anna muses. "You just get to the end." JESSICA BRUDER teaches narrative writing at the Columbia School of Journalism and is the author of "Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 5, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Alas, this is the ninth and final novel in Maupin's beloved Tales of the City series, the first three volumes of which were made into a television miniseries starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis, which has now achieved cult status. But let's not mourn the end of this run of rich, loving novels. Instead, let's read this tender last one as a celebration of the wonderful characters Maupin created, whose lives have centered on landlady and den-mother Anna Madrigal's home at 28 Barbary Lane in San Francisco. Anna is now 92 years old, as infirm as her age would dictate, but the feisty, generous, selfless spirit that has guided her and attracted so many people to her side remains unbroken. While a group of her friends heads off to Burning Man, the wild arts festival held yearly in the Nevada desert, other friends of Anna's take her back to her hometown, also in Nevada, which she has not visited since she left there as a boy in the 1930s, and where she now hopes to reconcile a situation that has been on her mind since then. Admirably, Maupin's last novel in the series is as compulsively readable and endearing as all previous novels have been. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: An eight-city author tour will be accompanied by national-media and online-publicity campaigns.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This ninth Tales of the City installment is Maupin's farewell to his beloved cast of characters. While his last few books have highlighted San Francisco's Michael "Mouse" Tolliver and Mary Ann Singleton, the author updates fans with 28 Barbary Lane's now-92-year-old transgendered landlady, Anna Madrigal. Anna is given the snappy, plucky dialogue she's known for, and some chapters reveal her backstory, including her 1930s childhood, when she was a boy named Andy. Everyone is on hand here: Brian, Mary Ann's ex and father of her daughter Shawna, makes an appearance, accompanied by his "fiftyish and luscious" new wife Wren, a former plus-sized model, along with Mouse and Mary Ann. Maupin's flare for dialogue and fully-realized, contemporary characterization is again on display, as he keeps things hip with the use of modern vernacular ("amazeballs", "chillax") and by incorporating iPads (Jake's "magic slate"), Angry Birds, missives on Twitter, and hooking up on Facebook. The story culminates in the group's attendance at the Burning Man "Fertility 2.0" festival, as Shawna searches for a sperm donor while Brian, Wren, and Anna detour off to Winnemucca for a revelatory reunion with Anna's past. Limned with the comfort of unconditional love yet reflective of the frailty, the uncertainty, and the beauty of aging, this installment is a memorable, satisfying capstone to his series. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Time marches on for all of us, including the beloved characters of Maupin's "Tales of the City" series (Mary Ann in Autumn; Babycakes). In what Maupin says is the last of the series, Anna Madrigal is 92 and frail; Michael is sixtysomething and feeling much older than his husband, Ben; and the youngest characters are starting to settle down. Once again, the characters revolve around Anna, but so does the plot; we see her backstory as a 16-year-old boy, growing up in a Depression-era brothel as she just begins to understand her nature. Interestingly, most of the action occurs far away from the eponymous city. Instead, the gang goes desert road-tripping: Anna on a last pilgrimage to the past, while the others go to the Burning Man festival, where the spirit of old San Francisco still lives on in collective art, community service, and freewheeling sexuality. VERDICT For fans definitely, but anyone may enjoy the peek into Burning Man culture, as well as the intergenerational twining of the characters and seeing just how far we have come in accepting ourselves. [See Prepub Alert, 8/12/13.]-Devon Thomas, Chelsea, MI (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
More "Tales of the City" (Mary Ann in Autumn, 2010, etc.), with the former residents of 28 Barbary Ln. still fluttering around their erstwhile landlady. Anna Madrigal is now 93 and very frail, but she's still got the gender-crossing panache that led her away from the whorehouse her mother ran in Winnemucca, Nev., and from the unwanted appendages associated with her youth as a boy named Andy. Having had one of the earliest sex-change operations in the U.S., Anna is a legend in the transgender community, and her young caretaker, Jake, has built a special float for her to ride at this year's Burning Man festival to receive what everyone knows will probably be her final accolades. He is ultimately persuaded by others in their San Francisco circle that it's too risky, and indeed, the closing chapters' vivid depiction of the "mosh pit in the desert," as Michael Tolliver calls Burning Man, makes it seem an unlikely place for an elderly lady. But while Michael, husband Ben, bisexual celebrity Shawna (who's looking for a sperm donor) and many others are cavorting in the Nevada desert, Anna has unfinished business in not-too-far-away Winnemucca, to which she has persuaded Shawna's father (and Michael's close friend), Brian, and his new wife, Wren, to drive her in their air-conditioned RV. So it's no surprise when Anna finally ends up at Burning Man after the not-terribly-dramatic resolution to a conflict laid out in flashbacks to the year she left home at 16. Readers not up to speed on the series may have trouble sorting out all the relationships (and genders), but Maupin spins his usual good-hearted web of intrigues involving people who have created their own community to shelter them from disapproving straights. The plot is as soap-operatic as usual, though thankfully, Maupin has abandoned the lurid improbabilities that marred Mary Ann in Autumn in favor of touching reunions and reconciliations. Sweet, undemanding entertainment most suitable for longtime fans.]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
