[The author of States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), White is an American educator, novelist, essayist, and critic. In the following review, he describes Maupin's dialogue in Maybe the Moon as "crisp" and discusses the development of both the major and minor characters.]

In the 1960s, it was fashionable to define a work of art as a machine for creating sensations. If so, Maybe the Moon (a deliberately corny title invented by a Hollywood producer in the novel) is an extremely efficient machine for producing sensations of pleasure, suspense, pathos and a highly critical kind of irony.

Armistead Maupin is a consummate entertainer who has made a generation laugh with his six-volume San Francisco saga, Tales of the City. If this time out he's more cutting, the change in tone may be ascribed to his change of venue, from San Francisco to the much more dynamic, violent and hypocritical Los Angeles of the movies.

The heroine is Cadence Roth, a former Guinness record-holder as the world's smallest woman, whose greatest role was one in which she was entirely invisible and anonymous. She animated the styrofoam body of a lovable elf, Mr Woods, in a top-grossing film epic of the ET variety.

The text we are reading is Cady's diary, in which she evokes: her airhead, affectionate room-mate Renee; her best friend, a gay militant named Jeff; her Hollywood agent, the fast-talking Leonard; her black lover, the considerate Neil; and, finally, her co-star in Mr Woods, the eternal juvenile Callum. The tone is relentlessly up-to-date, full of snappy one-liners and shtick, Hollywood name-dropping, bitchy come-backs and celebrity gossip—exactly the tone out-of-work actors adopt to assure themselves they're still in the "business". The "diary" is also funny and intelligent:

I found a copy of Rumpelstiltskin at Book City. I've been looking for a good one for ages, since it would make a fabulous movie and I'd be just right to play him. I wouldn't mind cross-dressing one more time, as long as my face remained visible. In this new version of the fable, which I read tonight, while I drank my Cher shake, Rumpelstiltskin is delicately described as "a little man" rather than as an evil dwarf. Such liberal revisionism is progress only if one prefers complete invisibility to outright scorn; I'm not sure I do.

Cady's vantage on the film industry is highly peculiar, since she is an anonymous star and, as a little person, is treated as a freak, even though her passions and needs and ambitions are larger than life. She finds her real place only in her inner circle. Within that circle a great deal of love circulates. It is Maupin's Dickensian gift to be able to render love convincingly.

Maupin is openly gay, but he cannot be defined as a "gay writer". In Maybe the Moon there are three gay characters, and the theme of being in the closet is a critical one, but the sympathetic gay character is absorbed into a circle of straight friends, and closetedness is seen as just one more form of hypocrisy in an industry ruled by greed and fear. Yet Maupin's experience as a gay man is everywhere apparent, in his humanizing treatment of marginal characters, his understanding of duplicity and his appreciation of the liberating power of honesty.

Sometimes the book veers towards a brassy mawkishness, but the sentimentality is always held in check by crisp dialogue, which serves to deflate everything exaggerated. Nabokov once said that he knew at first glance if a book was rubbish by checking to see if it was mainly dialogue. Reliable as his method usually is, it would have deprived him of the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Ronald Firbank, Henry Green—and of Armistead Maupin, all novelists who work their dialogue with jeweller's precision and a playwright's deployment of dramatic irony. When people speak, they are usually either deceiving others or fooling themselves, and this grim little truth has not escaped Maupin's attention.

With a raffishness worthy of his improbable name, Maupin has created a funny, memorable character in Cadence Roth. Fiercely independent, unapologetic about her pint size and gallons of desire, combative, quick-witted, she is a person readers will recall long after all the topical references in this novel have faded.

It's no longer popular to criticize Hollywood. There's something priggish and dated about it, as though one were an uncomprehending member of the Frankfurt School who simply can't get with the charms of mass culture. What this novel demonstrates is eccentric America where the masses are made up of nothing but weirdos. The close of Maybe the Moon reveals how Hollywood inevitably banalizes its subjects. The miracle is that Maupin's demonstration is itself far more polished and amusing than the narrative he satirizes.