[Johnson is an American novelist and critic. In the following review of Maybe the Moon, she centers on the theme of discrimination and the protagonist Cady Roth.]

Cadence (Cady) Roth longs to be a real movie star. But she cannot get away from her most famous role, as Mr. Woods, an E.T.- or Yoda-like character—in an electronically controlled rubber suit—in a hit science fiction movie. That this otherwise intelligent person does not understand why other offers are not rolling in is soon apparent to readers of Armistead Maupin's novel Maybe the Moon. Cady is a 31-inch-tall, fat dwarf.

Cady lives in Studio City, near Hollywood, with her airhead friend Renee, who is unaccountably happy to pay the entire rent, rub lotion on Cady's legs and lift her up onto chairs. Their dialogue is as snappy as that in a situation comedy, and like sitcom characters they live in a timeless world where nothing much matters but who had sex and who is auditioning for what, and there are long afternoons to hang out at the mall.

Though there are hints that the novel is a feminist parable, Cady identifies more with her many gay male friends than with other women. Intimately involved in their love lives, she describes herself as "the biggest fag hag this side of Susan Sarandon" and is more casually knowledgeable about S & M devices than one would expect of a woman who has to be lifted in and out of cars. "You look good together. I knew you would," she says after a successful matchmaking. She is less a woman at heart than one of the boys, everybody's tiny raunch confidant.

Cady represents not only a gay man, but all who must fight for acceptance—a mixed metaphor for the down-trodden. The most moving words in the novel are those that gay men would speak: "You spend your life accommodating the sensibilities of 'normal' people. You learn to bury your feelings and honor theirs in the hope that they'll meet you halfway. It becomes your job, and yours alone, to explain, to ignore, to forgive—over and over again."

In Maybe the Moon, Mr. Maupin's first novel since he completed his Tales of the City series, myths are the enemy. When Cady meets the handsome and incredibly kind Neil, who becomes her lover, she tells herself, "Don't objectify this guy. The black man as superstud is a dehumanizing myth." Nor should Neil objectify her. In case he hasn't heard, she tells him, "some black people see little people as … sort of enchanted. Like a good luck charm or something." Neil denies having ever heard this dehumanizing myth (Cady tells him Norwegians believe it too) and denies being affected in any way by her odd size.

The affair ends when Neil fails the blindness test; by not telling his young son the true nature of his relationship with Cady, he proves unable to rise above the reality of her appearance—which, annoyingly, is never really described. Cady "grosses me out," the child says, confirming what we hoped was not so—that Cady is no pretty little doll but a misshapen monster. When she mentions that some of her parts are normally sized, we are drawn into unpleasant prurience.

Cady's megalomaniacal ambition is to play herself in a movie about herself. Toward this end, Mr. Maupin includes directions to the set designer and, at the end, letters from a fictitious director and screenwriter who propose to turn these pages, written as Cady's diary, into a film (posthumously, for Cady dies shortly after a prank that she hopes will free her from her movie image forever). Both heap praise on the story, and the screenwriter makes sanitizing suggestions, such as removing interracial sex, dwarf sex and so on.

The screenwriter describes Cady as "this tiny, ambitious, infuriating, lovable woman who is both enslaved and ennobled by an icon of popular culture." But this theme is less striking than the one that lies everywhere between the lines: the challenge to all of us to see one other stripped of all racial and sexual myths and associations. Dwarf and gay, black and female are all equal under the sun.

This all may be ethically admirable, but as we strain to ignore appearance, as we struggle to rid our minds of all associations about groups of people and see them only in their plain, pure humanness, at the same time we wash away all their marvelous variety and consign all mankind to the dullness of perfect justice. It is the assumption that life is supposed to be fair that keeps Mr. Maupin's story on the level of situation comedy.