[In the following review of Significant Others, Mars-Jones contends that the story lacks the "inventiveness" and "high camp" of Maupin's earlier pre-AIDS novels.]

Significant Others is the fifth in Armistead Maupin's endearing Tales of the City series of sagas, about high and low life (but never depressingly low life) in San Francisco. In each book, Maupin plants a new generation of plot and character-seedlings, re-pots some mature blooms and thins out some others. He has the literary equivalent, in his wry, easy-going prose, of green fingers. He knows exactly when to be sharp and when sentimental.

If there is a break in the sequence, it is between volume three (Further Tales of the City) and four (Babycakes). The cause of the break can be stated very simply: AIDS. It's not just that the early books assume a high level of sexual exchangeability, without consequences, among the characters, though that is enough to give those volumes a period flavour. The first book of the series, Tales of the City, was only published in book form in 1978 (all the volumes were originally serialized in San Francisco papers), but reading it today is to feel like a Scott Fitzgerald character, contemplating the Jazz Age from after the Wall Street Crash with an unwanted wisdom.

More to the point, Maupin's technique depends on switching smoothly between stories. It is a technique that thrives on irony and contrast, but breaks down almost at once if one story-line begins to outweigh the others. A kaleidoscope can only contain so much black and still glitter.

Babycakes accommodated AIDS, but only in the past tense, with Michael "Mouse" Tolliver, the nearest thing the saga has to a hero, mourning the death of his doctor lover Jon Fielding. Maupin was adapting to changing reality. But there was relief to be felt as well as sorrow, since he was also writing off a liability: Jon was never quite believable as a character, and had to be taken on trust as Michael's soulmate.

In Significant Others the health crisis has made further inroads. Michael has learned he is HIV-positive, though he remains asymptomatic, and his best friend Brian finds that a woman with whom he has had an affair has come down with the syndrome. Brian, moreover, has swollen glands and a low fever; he takes the HIV test in fear and trembling, and waits the two weeks for the results.

Again, Maupin is doing all he can to be true to what is happening to his beloved City. If he leaves AIDS out, he must abandon the precious basis in reportage of his inventions; but if he lets AIDS too far in, his chosen tone of worldly sweetness cannot survive. It becomes obvious before the event that Brian will test negative, since only fear followed by relief can maintain the balance of the series.

So, too, when Michael contemplates his own health and the predicament of his city, Maupin produces some of his least convincing modulations. He starts on a powerful note: "It wasn't just an epidemic anymore; it was a famine, a starvation of the spirit…." But soon he is cracking jokes about pornography (it "wore out" but "reactivated itself if you looked at it upside down"). He closes off the issue on a note that even the most besotted City-dweller must find inadequate: "The worst of times in San Francisco was still better than the best of times anywhere else." At moments like this, Maupin is clearly out of his depth—unless it is the genre that lets him down.

Babycakes had a sombre feeling to it, and although the mood of Significant Others is much brighter, Maupin's inventiveness has not returned to pre-Babycakes levels. The first three volumes have bravura plotlines that aren't afraid of melodrama or high camp: the first book features transsexual secrets and child pornography, the second a mysterious sect based in Grace Cathedral, the third (most memorably) a return from the dead of the Reverend Jim Jones. Since then the peaks and troughs have been levelled out, whether from depression or an honourable sort of self-censorship: a resolve on Maupin's part that since he can only let a little reality into his fiction, he will try to keep the fantasy similarly constrained, so as not to offer false comfort.

As a result, Significant Others has a narrowness of range that makes it seem almost parochial. Much of the book describes goings-on at two contrasting festivals, The Bohemian Grove, a holiday camp that returns grown men if not to the womb then at least to the security of a college fraternity, and Wimminwood, a jamboree of heavy-duty feminism. The adventures are only moderately amusing. The book is a relatively sober romp, a decaffeinated brew compared to the heady espressos of the past.