Michael Tolliver Lives: A Novel By Armistead Maupin
Product Description
Michael Tolliver, the sweet-spirited Southerner in Armistead Maupin's classic Tales of the City series, is arguably one of the most widely loved characters in contem-porary fiction. Now, almost twenty years after ending his ground-breaking saga of San Francisco life, Maupin revisits his all-too-human hero, letting the fifty-five-year-old gardener tell his story in his own voice.
Having survived the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers, Michael has learned to embrace the random pleasures of life, the tender alliances that sustain him in the hardest of times. Michael Tolliver Lives follows its protagonist as he finds love with a younger man, attends to his dying fundamentalist mother in Florida, and finally reaffirms his allegiance to a wise octogenarian who was once his landlady.
Though this is a stand-alone novel—accessible to fans of Tales of the City and new readers alike—a reassuring number of familiar faces appear along the way. As usual, the author's mordant wit and ear for pitch-perfect dialogue serve every aspect of the story—from the bawdy to the bittersweet. Michael Tolliver Lives is a novel about the act of growing older joyfully and the everyday miracles that somehow make that possible.
Michael Tolliver, the sweet-spirited Southerner in Armistead Maupin's classic Tales of the City series, is arguably one of the most widely loved characters in contem-porary fiction. Now, almost twenty years after ending his ground-breaking saga of San Francisco life, Maupin revisits his all-too-human hero, letting the fifty-five-year-old gardener tell his story in his own voice.
Having survived the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers, Michael has learned to embrace the random pleasures of life, the tender alliances that sustain him in the hardest of times. Michael Tolliver Lives follows its protagonist as he finds love with a younger man, attends to his dying fundamentalist mother in Florida, and finally reaffirms his allegiance to a wise octogenarian who was once his landlady.
Though this is a stand-alone novel—accessible to fans of Tales of the City and new readers alike—a reassuring number of familiar faces appear along the way. As usual, the author's mordant wit and ear for pitch-perfect dialogue serve every aspect of the story—from the bawdy to the bittersweet. Michael Tolliver Lives is a novel about the act of growing older joyfully and the everyday miracles that somehow make that possible.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Maupin denies that this is a seventh volume of his beloved Tales of the City, but—happily—that's exactly what it is, with style and invention galore. When we left the residents of 28 Barbary Lane, it was 1989, and Michael "Mouse" Tolliver was coping with the supposed death sentence of HIV. Now, improved drug cocktails have given him a new life, while regular shots of testosterone and doses of Viagra allow him a rich and inventive sex life with a new boyfriend, Ben, "twenty-one years younger than I am—an entire adult younger, if you must insist on looking at it that way." Number 28 Barbary Lane itself is no more, but its former tenants are doing well, for the most part, in diaspora. Michael's best friend, ladies' man Brian Hawkins, is back, and unprepared for his grown daughter, Shawna, a pansexual it-girl journalist à la Michelle Tea, to leave for a New York career. Mrs. Madrigal, the transsexual landlady, is still radiant and mysterious at age 85. Maupin introduces a dazzling variety of real-life reference points, but the story belongs to Mouse, whose chartings of the transgressive, multigendered sex trends of San Francisco are every bit as lovable as Mouse's original wet jockey shorts contest in the very first Tales, back in 1978. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine Armistead Maupin and his popular Tales of the City series evolved from a mid-1970s column in the San Francisco Chronicle and, over the next decade, attracted a loyal following. Those readers, as well as newcomers to Maupin's fiction, are in for a treat with Michael Tolliver Lives. These loosely connected vignettes benefit from Maupin's engaging voice, though the pacing is a bit uneven in places and plot takes a back seat to well-drawn, likeable characters. Critics inevitable compare the novel to Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones books or Sex and the City, though Maupin generally does it better. First-timers should find the new installment engaging enough to go back to the early volumes.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist *Starred Review* The title of this charming, heartwarming novel is perfectly pertinent to the story it tells. Michael Tolliver was one of the chief characters in Maupin's popular and now-classic Tales of the City series about 1980s gay life in San Francisco, where AIDS struck particularly hard. As Maupin picks up the story line two decades later, Michael, now in his midfifties, has survived the disease that so many of his cohorts did not. A southerner, Michael has lived in the City by the Bay for 30 years, and at this point in his life, he has much that is satisfying to look back on and much in his current life to be thankful for, especially his membership in the "sweet confederacy of survivors." This is a kind of wrapping-up novel, but also a giving-thanks one, as Michael bids farewell to his mother back in Florida and to his feisty former landlady, Anna Madrigal, another of the memorable recurrent characters from Tales of the City. Michael takes immense pleasure in the love he shares with a much-younger man, who stirs him to count the blessings of each day, one at a time. Sweet without being sappy. Brad HooperCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved .
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