Maupin visits old friends but can’t go home again

ARMISTEAD Maupin’s “Tales of the City” is one of these works you never quite get over, the kind that takes up residence in your heart. After starting to appear as a serial novel in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1976, the saga ultimately went on -- both within and outside of the paper -- for 13 years, filling six books with its heightened social melodrama, its lovingly exaggerated portrayal of Bay Area life.

Part of its genius had to do with Maupin’s ability to create characters who embodied the various zeitgeists of 1970s and 1980s San Francisco: Mary Ann, the transplant from Cleveland; her best friend, Michael, a gay man looking for fulfillment; Mona, the bisexual ex-hippie; and Brian, the kindhearted Lothario -- all brought together by Mrs. Anna Madrigal, the pot-growing, transsexual landlady who created an alternative family for them in her building at the fictional 28 Barbary Lane. But equally important was Maupin’s training as a journalist, which enabled him to invest these stories with a vivid immediacy, integrating events like Jonestown and the AIDS crisis into the fiber of his work.

To read “Tales” now is to look at the genetic imprint of an era, beginning with the hedonistic glories of post-hippie freedom and ending with a community forced to face early mortality. The series made its author a star. “Tales of the City” spawned three television miniseries and inspired a choral work; these days, there are even “Tales” tours of San Francisco, highlighting many of the locations Maupin describes.

Of course, creating a legend can be a burden, as Maupin’s subsequent career shows. In 1989, after the publication of “Sure of You,” the final book in the series, he turned his attentions elsewhere, writing a Hollywood novel, “Maybe the Moon,” and a psychological thriller, “The Night Listener.” Yet if both these efforts have their moments, they lack the sensibility that made “Tales of the City” such a revelation, so connected to its time and place.

Clearly, Maupin himself must have felt this, for his new novel, “Michael Tolliver Lives,” returns to one of the main figures of his iconic work. “Michael Tolliver Lives” is not, Maupin has said, the seventh “Tales of the City” novel; it describes a different San Francisco, where in the wake of AIDS and the dot-com bust, things are calmer, quieter, like a lull after a storm.

Still, the book does have an undeniable air of homecoming, a quality of return. Partly this has to do with Michael, always the most realized of Maupin’s characters -- to some extent, perhaps, a stand-in for the author. More than that, however, it’s the sense that with “Michael Tolliver Lives,” Maupin has come back to the territory where he has the deepest roots. As he writes in an early chapter, “In my best moments I’m filled with a curious peace, an almost passable impersonation of how it used to be.”

This is a key statement, for Michael is a survivor, saved by the AIDS cocktail, a man who nearly died. It’s not an uncommon condition; “Here in our beloved Gayberry,” he says, “you can barely turn around without gazing into the strangely familiar features of someone long believed dead.”

For Michael, though, the specter of death is, if not a comfort, then its own odd liberation, a reminder of exactly what’s at stake. Nearly a generation after “Tales of the City” ended, he is deeply settled, living in a house he bought with a former partner, and newly married -- to a man 22 years his junior -- at San Francisco City Hall.

Here, we get a glimpse of what Maupin, at his best, has always done: linked the individual and the collective story, unfolded his narrative against the backdrop of larger events. It’s the novel as social history, an aesthetic reminiscent of Balzac, and if Maupin doesn’t write with that degree of depth, he does know how to seed a story, using this novel to address not just gay marriage but also such contemporary fascinations as Christian fundamentalism, blogging and the war in Iraq.

Unfortunately, for all that “Michael Tolliver Lives” seeks to evoke the aura of its moment, the novel remains flat in some essential way. Partly it’s because the targets are too easy: When an extended subplot involving Michael’s born-again brother, Irwin, and his wife, Lenore, ends with a revelation of hypocrisy, we can almost see the author’s finger-wagging, and even in the more personal moments, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Maupin is drifting across the surface, letting our familiarity with Michael do much of the narrative work.

This raises an important question, which has to do with the novel’s ability to stand on its own. “Michael Tolliver Lives” may not be the rebirth of “Tales of the City,” but it is connected and comes with certain expectations. What is the responsibility of the writer in such a situation? How much does he really need to do?

Maupin goes out of his way to bring back the original “Tales of the City” characters along with their respective partners and progeny, weaving a major plotline around Mrs. Madrigal, who at 85 continues to face the present with her own peculiar grace. Yet if for longtime readers these interactions add an air of comfort, they also seem vestigial, even forced. This is particularly true of Mary Ann, who centered the original series and broke up the band, as it were, when she left for New York at the end of “Sure of You.” Her cameo here feels unlikely, gratuitous even, a tacked-on bit of resolution in a narrative universe that has always thrived on an open-ended edge of possibility.

Perhaps the real issue is that “Tales of the City” succeeded because it was an ensemble piece, in which the sum was greater than the parts. “Michael Tolliver Lives” is the story of a single character and, as such, can’t sustain itself without the connections it needs in order to thrive. That’s a tricky criticism, for we all get older and, like Michael, need to settle down. Yet in “Michael Tolliver Lives,” Maupin never gives us a wide enough perspective to bring that process fully to life.

david.ulin@latimes.com