SOURCE: "Serial Thriller," in The Village Voice Literary Supplement, No. 79, October, 1989, p. 13.

[An American educator and critic, Kendrick is the author of The Novel-Machine: The Theory and Fiction of Anthony Trollope (1980). In the following essay, he focuses on the development of the characters and themes in Maupin's Tales of the City novels.]

Eleven years and 2000 pages later, Mary Ann Singleton has finally arrived. Way back when, at the beginning of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City (1978), she was a naive Clevelander who'd come to San Francisco for a week's vacation and decided not to go home. Now, at the end of the sixth and final installment, Sure of You, she's moved to New York, where she hosts a nationally syndicated talk show, Mary Ann in the Morning. People calls her "the new Mary Hart."

"The who?" asks Mrs. Madrigal (Mary Ann's ex-landlady) when Brian Hawkins (Mary Ann's ex-husband) tells her that bit of news.

"Just this woman on Entertainment Tonight."

"Oh."

"I'll bring you the article."

"Don't go to any trouble, dear."

He smiled a little.

It's a seemingly casual exchange, typical of Maupin's colloquial style, but if you've been following his characters through their six volumes, you know it means the end of Mary Ann. Mrs. Madrigal doesn't care about her anymore, and when Mrs. Madrigal drops you, you'd be better off dead.

Not that Mary Ann didn't have it coming: there was something a little dubious about her from the start. In Tales of the City, she was the sole witness of Norman Williams's drunken tumble off a cliff into the Pacific. Granted, she didn't push him, and he'd been a child pornographer as well as a private detective spying on Mrs. Madrigal—but Mary Ann never reported the death, and she told the full story only to Michael Tolliver, her best friend.

In Further Tales of the City (1982), she helped DeDe Halcyon Day bury Jim Jones's corpse under the azaleas in Frannie Halcyon's garden. Granted, Mary Ann didn't kill him (Emma, Frannie's maid, shot him between the eyes), and nobody would wish Jim Jones resurrected a second time. But that made two secret deaths to Mary Ann's discredit.

Things worsened in Babycakes (1984), when she tried to get pregnant by Simon Bardill, former officer aboard the royal yacht Britannia. Simon's physical resemblance to Brian (whom Mary Ann had married at the end of Further Tales) would enable her, she thought, to pass off the baby as Brian's. She knew, you see, that Brian, the flaming heterosexual, was sterile; she'd had his sperm tested, secretly, and never told him the results. What she didn't know was that Simon, at his nanny's suggestion, had had a vasectomy.

Her scam came to nothing, but at the 11th hour a messenger arrived with Connie Bradshaw's baby, whom the dying Connie had instructed him to hand over to Mary Ann and Brian. Now, Connie was a high school friend of Mary Ann's she'd roomed with during her first days as a San Franciscan. Brian had once picked Connie up at the Come Clean laundromat; she was so terminally tacky she owned a Pet Rock, and …

Do I digress? I sound like a contestant in the Days of Our Lives summarizing contest. You had to be there—rather, you have to read it, all 1500 pages. Sure of You is being advertised, correctly, as a self-contained novel. The story is touching, funny, all the things it's supposed to be, and all on its own. But if you've read its five predecessors, you feel a special warmth at moments like that exchange between Brian and Mrs. Madrigal. You feel it resonate across a decade.

Anyhow, it's impossible not to digress when you talk about Maupin's tales: he deploys his characters so skillfully, intertwining their lives in such surprising ways, that none of their stories can be understood without taking everybody else's into account. Mary Ann isn't the saga's central character (it doesn't have one), but her sojourn in San Francisco, from 1976 to 1989, defines Maupin's chosen tract of history. And her departure doesn't just mark the end of Maupin's tales. It means that, for him, an era has ended.

Mary Ann really hit the skids in Significant Others (1987). Sometime since Babycakes, she'd landed her own local talk-show—no crime in itself. However, in keeping with her new "lifestyle" (Mary Ann's word), she'd made Brian and little Shawna (Connie named her) move into a 23rd-floor apartment in The Summit, a glitzy high-rise atop Russian Hill. Of course, they couldn't conveniently bring the kid up at 28 Barbary Lane, where they used to live with Mrs. Madrigal, Michael, and a shifting assortment of extras; as late as 1987, it was still easy to make excuses for Mary Ann. Yet the two buildings had become symbolic of contradictory values, and Mary Ann chose the shabby ones.

Her treachery in Sure of You stems directly from that move to the 23rd floor. The proximate cause is Burke Andrew, who appeared in More Tales of the City (1980) as a sexy amnesiac bent on filling in the three-month gap in his recent past (it turned out to involve an Episcopal cannibal cult, but that's another story). Now he's a hotshot New York producer, and Mary Ann secretly sells out to him. She dumps husband, child, friends, past, everything, for the sake of showing her face on national TV and lying to millions through her ivory teeth. The last we see of her, she's helping designer Russell Rand (who came on to Michael at a party) perpetuate the loathsome fiction that he's straight.

"You're one coldhearted bitch, you know that?" Brian snarls when he confronts her with his knowledge of her scheming. And so she is—now. Foreshadowings aside, she wasn't always that way. Not too many years ago, she fit in perfectly at 28 Barbary Lane. She laughed and cried with Brian and Michael, smoked Mrs. Madrigal's home-grown sinsemilla, and thumbed her nose at conventionality like the rest of them. But she changed with the times.

In Significant Others, Michael described her to his newfound love, Thack Sweeney:

"Perky. Sweet. Ambitious. Too serious about the eighties."

"Oh"

"It doesn't bother me. She was just as serious about the seventies."

"Are you friends with her?"

"Oh, sure," said Michael. "Not as much as I used to be, but …"

For Maupin, it seems, taking the '80s seriously means turning into a coldhearted bitch. And at least as far as these old friends are concerned, he's given up on the '90s in advance.

Not only Mary Ann changed, of course. DeDe Halcyon and Mona Ramsey both came out as lesbians. DeDe still lives at Halcyon Hill with D'orothea, who used to be black, and DeDe's twins by the Japanese grocery boy; in Sure of You, the women have opened a restaurant in the newly fashionable Tenderloin. Mona, meanwhile, remains in England, still Lady Roughton, still tending the moldy splendors of Easley House; Teddy, Lord Roughton, drives a San Francisco taxi and frequents JO parties. In Sure of You, Mona and Mrs. Madrigal vacation on the Isle of Lesbos, where Mrs. Madrigal has a fling with a local man and Mona meets several lesbians. Mona, by the way, still thinks Mrs. Madrigal is her father. You see …

These characters—and Michael and Brian, all the good guys—have changed, grown, and suffered, too, but they haven't junked the past. And they never forget their friends, who mean more to them than family. At the whimpering end of the '80s, they linger a bit forlornly, perhaps, in a world captured by the likes of Mary Ann; at least since Significant Others, their best days have seemed to lie behind them. Nevertheless, they hold on to their embattled virtues, and they look forward. Even Michael does—though during the same dire years that transformed Mary Ann, he lost the love of his life to AIDS and tested HIV-positive himself.

Until Maupin supposedly crossed over with Significant Others, he had been categorized as a "gay writer." This amphibious species is said to write chiefly about gay life, for like-minded readers. Maupin's tales, however, have never been so narrowly focused. From the start, he has sought to portray a microcosm in which every sexual bent—homo-, hetero-, bi-, trans-, and undecided—coexists amid comprehensive love and respect. In the '70s, when gay fiction (maybe gay life, too) was full of all-night discos and pining for love, Michael danced in a Jockey-short contest; now he attends memorials and pops AZT. But Michael's is only one career among many. If Maupin's sparkle has dimmed, AIDS and the tarnishing of the gay dream can be held only partly responsible. He started by celebrating a generation's goofy, reckless freedom; 11 years later, he sees us all, gay or straight, going into the dark.

The easiest way of summing up Maupin's tales is to call them imaginative history: They show how some typical characters lived in a real place during a span of real years. Future historians, if there are any, will revere his books, both for the quaint attitudes they portray and for the ephemera they put on record. Maupin's era—mine, too—is the first in human history that defined itself by what it loved for an instant, then threw out. Future readers (if there are any) may require footnotes. Even now, I can hardly recall what a Pet Rock signified in 1976.

In this, I'm not so different from the despicable Mary Ann. When she digs Connie's Pet Rock out of the closet, late in Sure of You, she gives us on explaining it to five-year-old Shawna: "Well … people used to have these" is the best she can manage. I'm no coldhearted bitch, but I couldn't do better. So it goes with modern milestones. The plus side is that, very soon, the whole world may join Mrs. Madrigal in drawing a blank at the name Mary Hart.

The down side is that Maupin, who has tallied a decade's parade of trivia, risks being pigeonholed as merely the chronicler of late 20th century fads and foibles. Despite some evident limitations, he's done better than that. His scope is narrow: All but a few of his major characters are white, middle-class, college-educated men and women, between 35 and 45 years old in 1989; they spend little time on politics, indeed on ideas of any kind; if you called them airheads, you'd be unkind, not wrong. Yet it's a rare airhead who gets caught up in the labyrinthine intrigues that snare Maupin's characters every time the phone rings.

His characters may be shallow, but their stories spin like bedroom farces on a grand, sometimes global scale. Each volume sets up three or four plots and leapfrogs from one to another in a series of short chapters; suspense builds, until you're getting a cliffhanger every couple of pages. The plots range from improbable to bizarre, but Maupin lays them out beautifully. Just seeing how he ties up his loose ends (as, with one exception, he never fails to do) can make you dizzy with delight.

It's an old-fashioned pleasure, too; there's been nothing like it since the heyday of the serial novel 100 years ago. To savor the fun at full strength, I suppose you had to read the tales as they originally appeared, a chapter a week, in the San Francisco Chronicle and later the Examiner. (Sure of You is the only volume written to be published as a unit.) But tearing through them one after the other, as I did, allows instant gratification; it also lets you appreciate how masterfully they're constructed. No matter what Maupin writes next, he can look back on the rare achievement of having built a little world and made it run.

So eat shit and die, if I may say so, Mary Ann. I'll miss Brian, Michael, DeDe, and the rest; my only regret is that I'll never know why Mrs. Madrigal didn't tell Mona she wasn't really her mother. Father. Whatever.