Final ‘Tales’ novel stars landlady
Print Edition
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’ 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 1970s through the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s 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 and gained an international cult following.
The series’ 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.
Making “small surrenders” with dignity is part of what Anna calls “leaving like a lady.” The other part? Traveling back to Winnemucca, Nevada, where Andy Ramsey — Anna as a child — lived at the Blue Moon Lodge, his mother’s brothel.
“The Days of Anna Madrigal” is a genial fable. Like the earlier “Tales,” it’s riddled with outlandish coincidences. Told in Maupin’s roving style, the narrative braids Anna’s story, childhood flashbacks and scenes of her adopted kin, many of whom are preparing to attend Burning Man, a cultural festival that ends with the burning of an effigy. 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 luxurious RV.
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.
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