Tales of the City Continues!

I was finishing up a piece on San Francisco and JavaOne, when I glanced at the Amazon ads at the bottom of the page, and was shocked to see that Michael Tolliver Lives! Yes, it’s the seventh volume in the Tales of the City series (though Maupin doesn’t want to call it that.) and it should be out on June 1.

Personally I’ve always been fascinated by series that follow characters through a life, especially a modern life, and Tales of the City is very much like that. You see characters not just in individual stories but evolving over time.

Recently I discovered the Up Series on DVD. My wife couldn’t stand it, but I couldn’t stop watching it. To this American, the obsession with the British class system seemed a little silly (it probably seemed more relevant in 1963 when the series started) but watching these people grow up was entrancing.

Probably the first such series I read in which the characters actually grew up would have been Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy books from the turn of the last century. I probably would have liked Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, but somehow the TV show put me off them (though I did enjoy Farmer Boy). There were also the Beverly Cleary books with Ramona Quimby and Henry Huggins, but although they grew up slowly, they didn’t grow nearly as fast as I did, and certainly never reached adulthood. Last I checked, thirty years later, Ramona was now 9. By contrast, Betsy Ray managed to go from first grade to young adulthood in the course of a roughly a dozen novels I finished by about sixth grade. I suspect discovering the series after it’s already complete is part of the fascination, so I can digest it in compressed form. Series I’ve grown up with and that aged at roughly the same rate I did such as Doonesbury and many television shows don’t have the same appeal.

But I digress. I first discovered Tales of the City about 10 years ago, shortly after I moved to Brooklyn, and devoured all six books. I even wove some references to it into the XML Bible. I’ve read all of Maupin’s work since then, and enjoyed all three television series. His later books have been good, but I didn’t feel connected to them in the same way. I didn’t feel like these characters were friends I knew, rather than simply people I was reading about. There are connections between Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener and Tales of the City, but not significant ones. Still my absolute favorite part of the Night Listener was when I realized just who the narrator’s assistant really was. It felt like unexpectedly encountering a friend you haven’t seen for twenty years; and I felt really glad to see that she’d grown up and done OK.

Maupin said he was going to stop writing Tales of the City books because he didn’t want to write Michael Tolliver’s death scene. Personally I hope he still hasn’t done that; and I’m glad he keeps going back to that well. Of course we’ll see Michael Tolliver one more time, and Mrs. Madrigal is still going strong at 85. Some of the children have grown up and become characters in their own right. I’m not sure who else we’ll see. At this point one book is not nearly enough to cover all the characters who’ve weaved in and out of the stories over the years, and Maupin does tend to lose track of people from book to book. Mona more or less vanished in the middle of the series but reappeared toward the putative end, and even Mrs. Madrigal faded into the background in the last couple of books. I’d like to see more of her this time around, and perhaps Mary Ann Singleton. I can’t wait for June 1.

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