BOOKS: Michael Tolliver Lives, Armistead Maupin (2007)

Nearly twenty years after the last novel in the Tales of the City series, Maupin takes us back to San Francisco to check in on some of the characters from those books.

The most obvious difference from the earlier books is that this one is told in first-person by Michael. He's somewhat surprised to find himself still alive, as are many men who contracted HIV in the early years of the epidemic, then survived long enough to take advantage of new medicines. Michael's happily married now; he was part of the crowd who married at City Hall during San Francisco's short-lived fling with gay marriage. His husband, Ben, is in his early 30s, "a whole adult younger than me," as Michael puts it.

I had not re-read the earlier volumes before reading this one, and I don't think you need to. I'm not even sure you should; reading Michael is like catching up with old friends you haven't seen in a long time. Maupin does a nice job of bringing us up to speed on what everyone has been up to, in a graceful way that never feels like exposition for its own sake.

The main plotline has Michael and Ben going to Florida, where Michael is visiting his dying mother. As with the earlier Tales volumes, plot isn't the most important thing; the earliest volumes began life as a newspaper column, which contributed to the episodic nature of the storytelling. No, what matters here are the characters and their relationships, and as always, the relationships among Maupin's characters are precisely drawn and entirely believable.

I was just a bit disappointed by the ending of the book. Maupin walks right up to the edge of an ending that (sad though it would have been) would have been the perfect way to end the Tales saga; he backs off at the last moment, though, leaving us with an ending that is happier (in a muted way), but less emotionally fulfilling. Still, it's a joy to revisit these characters again, and Michael Tolliver Lives is a sweetly delightful postscript to the Tales series.