[Harvey was an American film curator and critic. In the following review, he focuses on the characters and plot of Further Tales of the City.]

According to Michael, the Tales of the City trilogy's gay-clone Candide, there are two kinds of people in this world—or at least in San Francisco, which in Armistead Maupin's oeuvre amounts to the same thing. Either you are a Tony, one of those benighted souls who think the city's theme song is the Bennett rendition of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," or a Jeanette, an aficionado of the blithe and gallant Miss MacDonald's anthem, "San Francisco," from the movie of the same name. Michael, ca va sans dire, is a Jeanette; his best female chum Mary Ann, a budding local TV personality, is one by osmosis, although when she first arrived on the scene fresh from Cleveland at the start of book one, she was indisputably a Tony. Their landlady Mrs. Madrigal (father—don't ask—of Mona, who is getting her head together in Seattle) probably thinks she is Jeanette, especially when she has partaken of the leaves pruned from Miss Barbara Stanwyck, the most potent marijuana plant in her herb garden. Hillsborough matron Franny Halcyon just can't help being a Tony. But then Franny's endured so many traumas in the past—having lost her husband from bum kidneys, her closety son-in-law in an auto wreck, and daughter Dede Halcyon Day to that mess in Guyana—that one can hardly begrudge her her foibles, which also include an unfortunate predilection for mixing Quaaludes with her Mai Tais.

New York could never inspire a chronicle quite like Maupin's. It requires a burg which, for all its cosmopolite airs, is sufficiently insular to allow for such unexpected incestuous connections. Still, vicarious Jeanettes everywhere (plus the besotted Franny herself) should be pleased to learn that on the other side of the Embarcadero, Dede and her half-Chinese twins have rematerialized in Further Tales of the City, more or less unscathed by their ordeal. They'll likewise be relieved to discover that Maupin's quill is as ruefully bitchy as ever. He nimbly skewers those local social butterflies whose idea of an urgent civic project is an upscale Madame Tussaud's to enshrine the effigies of such notables as Nan Kempner and Ann Getty. When it comes to what is euphemistically called the gay subculture, Maupin is, in the words of Margo Channing, as trustworthy as The World Almanac.

The passages devoted to Michael's irony-tinged interlude with middle-aged movie idol―(the one who used to make those sex comedies co-starring―before reportedly exchanging matrimonial vows with TV rube―), are only surpassed by his mirthsome account of his hero's trip to a gay rodeo, during which Michael becomes blissfully lost in the arms of a construction worker from Salome, Arizona, who, best of all, has never even heard of Oscar Wilde. At a rustic whoop-up of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, "there were so many different plaids … that it looked like a gathering of the clans"; in his favorite bar, Michael muses that someday "the homoerotic cave drawings in San Francisco's gay bars would be afforded the same sort of reverence that is currently heaped upon WPA murals and deco apartment house lobbies." Maupin indisputably gives great punch line, and he's pretty adroit at sallies of flippant sentiment to cap off the book's more tranquil chapters.

Presumably because both first saw the light as serials in the popular press, Maupin's sagas have been likened by some to Dickens's treatments of Victorian London—a comparison best left unfathomed. Maupin's deftness is in direct proportion to the parochial nature of his observations; his half-hearted attempt to give Further Tales broader contemporary resonance turns out to be a queasy misfire. The book climaxes with a wild loon chase to Alaska by Mary Ann and Dede, in quest of a man who may or may not turn out to be Jim Jones incarnate. But Maupin's etching of this figure is too glib for horror, and its subject too disquieting and tangible a memory to comfortably suit as the red-herring gimmick in a camp melodrama plot. (The fanciful cult of Episcopal cannibals that graced More Tales was rather more like it.)

Here's hoping Maupin stays faithful to the dizzy mundanities of his characters' slapstick soap-opera lives in the next installment. Will Mary Ann's new spouse, the lackadaisical ex-activist Brian, be able to cope with her ascent to media celebrity? Will Michael contract GRID and his sporadic lover, Dr. Jon, come up with the cure? Who's willing to bet that the transplanted Mona just happened to take a camping trip in the shadow of Mount St. Helens moments before the big bang, and will return to the hearth on Barbary Lane, slightly ashen but sardonic as ever? I can hardly wait to find out.