[In the following review of Maybe the Moon, Ulin contends that the characters are stereotypical and the story fails to mirror real life.]

Back in the late '70's, Armistead Maupin came up with a truly brilliant idea: to write a serial novel, a comedy of manners that would unfold day to day in the pages of a major metropolitan newspaper. It was a very 19th century concept—Dickensian, even—but Maupin's approach seemed completely here-and-now. His intention was to take America's shifting cultural landscape and reflect it in a work that would feature a wide cross-section of characters—gay and straight, male and female, rich and poor—all residents of Maupin's beloved San Francisco. The result, Tales of the City, grew over the next decade from a local Bay Area phenomenon into a six-volume national bestseller and, ultimately, assured its author's place among the most inventive and light-hearted social satirists of his era.

Now Maupin has completed his first post-Tales effort, Maybe the Moon, a novel that takes on the myth and reality of Hollywood, where secrets are regularly guarded under the guise of "movie magic." That's the situation Cadence (Cady) Roth—31 inches tall and a former "World's Shortest Mobile Adult Human"—finds herself in. Having briefly flirted with fame, or at least notoriety, in the early '80s, Cady is forbidden by directorial decree to tell the public that she was the actor inside Mr. Woods, an E.T.-like elf who once took the motion picture world by storm. To further complicate matters, her best friend, Jeff, falls in love with Callum Duff, the former child star of Mr. Woods, who, at 21, is a lonely, closeted man, playing a cop in a Basic Instinct-type psychokiller film that has the gay community up in arms.

It's a set-up that's pure Maupin, full of delicious ironies and ripe for the tweaking. As usual, the author's portrayals of his characters' tangled motivations, their longings and desires, are right on the mark, especially in moments between Cady and Jeff, or Cady and her valley-girl room-mate, Renee. And when Cady meets Neil Riccarton, a piano player who becomes her accompanist and eventually her lover, Maupin almost makes sparks fly off the page. Their lovemaking scenes in particular are handled deftly, with an easy humor that avoids the more obvious pratfalls which come to mind when we try to visualize a full-size man and a two-and-a-half-foot-tall woman having sex.

Despite its inspirational flashes, Maybe the Moon doesn't take shape as successfully as Tales of the City did. Perhaps that's because Maupin has a less detailed knowledge of Hollywood, of its dirty secrets and hidden charms, than he did of San Francisco, a city where he's lived for over 20 years. Possibly he lacks confidence in this new territory, a literary landscape he's just learning to explore. Whatever the reason, his accounts of the movie business are often too stereotypical to ring true. It's a little tired, for instance, that Cady's agent never returns her calls unless he wants something, or that Philip Blenheim, the Spielbergesque director of Mr. Woods, acts like an overgrown child playing with expensive toys. Such images develop into black-and-white pictures of a world that Maupin has, up to now, always portrayed in subtle and luxurious shades of gray.

Then there's the problem of topicality, of Maybe the Moon's relationship to the headlines we all know so well. Similar impulses, of course, were at work in Tales of the City, which, running in a daily paper, had no choice but to keep up with the news. Tales used front-page stories—such as the saga of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple—to maintain its characters and plot lines within a recognizable universe, but those elements hardly ever got in the way of the narrative.

In Maybe the Moon, however, nearly every page brings a new political commonplace: Cady takes on Operation Desert Storm, "that nifty little Super Bowl of a war [we] all just watched on television"; she talks "about the scary new coup in Russia, about Peewee, about the white man's black man Bush wants on the Supreme Court." Even though I'm sympathetic to Maupin's politics, all the editorializing tends to trivialize his story, turning it into a snapshot rather than a reflection of the times.

That's too bad, because fiction functions best as a mirror, as something we can use to show us how we live. Such was the beauty of Tales of the City. Maupin clearly aims for the same universal quality in Maybe the Moon but, unfortunately, gets stuck on the launching pad.