Welcome, all tale-tellers, to Tales of Sequel Country. This week, while building on the sex theme from last week, I’m going to do something different to the kind of analytical, how-to-write guide I’ve been pursuing on and off all year. I’m going to look at Armistead Maupin’s much-loved Tales of the City sequence, a novel that has spawned a total of eight sequels over four decades. They form three internal trilogies, too: one pre-AIDS, one during AIDS, and one “millennial”. Clearly there must be something to be learnt here about sequels.
Of course, it’s not just relevant to me as a series of sequels, but it’s cherished for its sympathetic portrayals of gay men, lesbians and trans people (but sadly not bisexuals). One of my aims when writing Parallel Lines and sequel was to make something similarly warm-hearted, feelgood (without rose-tinting) and with a positive ending for the main characters. So what makes Tales tick?
The first novel and the first two sequels (More and Further Tales) are almost a continuous story, told in very short chapters which all have cute little titles. There’s a cast of quite a few characters, but because the chapters are short we see each one again and again and become familiar with them and their drives and setbacks, which I think helps their likeability. To an extent, it’s like a soap, with the characters often just going shopping at the Safeway or having sandwiches in a park in their lunch-hour, at least in the first two books.
The most central characters are Michael, who is gay, and Mary Ann, who is newly arrived in San Francisco from Cleveland. Michael has a straight counterpart, Brian, allowing us to see how similar their lives are, revolving around the pursuit of very frequent casual sex. Michael’s roommate is Mona, and all four of them are young and unskilled, moving from one temp job to the next, and smoking weed grown by their magnanimous landlady, Mrs. Madrigal. It’s easy to like poor-but-trying characters, I suppose. Many more characters come on the scene; so many, in fact, that two characters die in the first book and one in the second and third. Some of the characters have families, as I discussed in part 11 on family, and the plot even depends on them sometimes.
Each of the first three books centre around a mystery: in the first, it surrounds an older lodger, in the second, a boyfriend for Mary Ann who has amnesia, and in the third, a mysterious stranger. Really, though, these are little more than themes, sub-plots that go on while the cast are experiencing their daily lives. But their presence elevates a collection of stories into something that can reasonably be called a novel, with a psychologically satisfying ending (though as I mentioned in part 4 on approaches, these first three novels also form one continuous story). The remaining sequels were published further apart and are structured as conventional novels, each with its own fully-formed plot, themes and to some extent tone, though there is a continuity of style which helps the long-time reader get into them. Of these, I think the three middle books, set during the AIDS crisis, are the best of the nine. Babycakes is a two-stranded book around Mary Ann and Brian trying for a baby (though this plot is driven by the flimsiest of premises), while Michael recovers from the death of the great love of his life from AIDS. Significant Others has Michael meeting someone new and Brian pondering fidelity in the AIDS era while cultures clash (in a funny, low-stakes way) between the exclusively male Bohemian Grove and women-only Wimminwood Festival. Sure Of You completes the cycle’s focus from love lives mainly being about sex, to sex lives being mainly about love.
The final three sequels, set decades later, pick up the characters’ concerns in later life and the seventh and eighth are predominantly backward-looking, and for me the plot twists are much weaker. There is more focus on the trans experience (still no bisexuals). They do strive to do new things in terms of storytelling; Michael Tolliver Lives is told in the first person by Michael, though this adds little to the close-third-person narrative of the earlier books with chapters where we know his thoughts through the omniscient narrator; Mary Ann In Autumn centres on Mary Ann, trying to redeem herself while hanging on to the privilege she’s accumulated; only the ninth book, The Days Of Anna Madrigal really does something new, going back to Mrs. Madrigal’s early life in flashback, before returning to the present-day character going to the modern-day Burning Man Festival in her 90s. For me it works the best of these three sequels, doing something genuinely new compared to the previous books, in terms of both the kind of story being told and the way the author tells it.
Happily, Maupin isn’t dead yet, but he has declared the Tales of the City story closed (again), and in my view the AIDS-era novels will be what he’s remembered for forever, and not just because I think they’re the best crafted. Babycakes was one of the first gay novels of the AIDS period, soon after it was named and years before HIV was identified as a single virus and its cause. It has turned Michael into an activist, and we see him volunteering on a community phone line before he burns out. But they are more than just novels that brilliantly capture their times. As I said, the focus of the series shifts from sex to love, and that can be read at multiple levels:
• the author himself becoming more mature
• an appropriate theme for the characters maturing from their 20s into their 30s
• a transition forced upon the LGBT community by the AIDS pandemic
Now that we’ve seen another pandemic, and exactly the same response by UK/USA political leaders of trying to pretend that nothing serious is happening, it’s clear that there are wider themes here. But as a snapshot of the changing LGBT community, which I’ll write more about next week, the middle Tales of the City sequels don’t just capture, but actually embody, the changing times.
In part 31 on sex scenes, I noted that the earlier books dodge talking about sex at all; even the heterosexual sex takes place off-stage. In the story’s origin as a newspaper serial, Maupin was editorially required to have more straight characters than gay ones; but there’s no denying that sexual relationships drive most of the characters, most of the time. One could argue that he could have added sex scenes at the point of publishing them as novels, and a modern reader unaware of the history would probably think the writer was insufficiently “sex positive”; naturally, one reason not to describe gay sex is homophobia, including internalised homophobia. To write about gay life without mentioning gay sex smells of homophobia, something which all writers of LGBT+ stories have to consider.
But separate from the issue of sex scenes, what the series documents for its gay characters (there are no sympathetic bi male characters and bi women are considered ‘dykes’) is a move away from promiscuity towards coupledom (though not rigid monogamy). In the early books, even permanent gay couples are depicted as happily non-monogamous. Later, Michael’s romantic dreams (established from the start) change form, and in the middle trilogy he is building a couple-relationship at the same time as the core heterosexual relationship, between Mary Ann and Brian, is breaking apart as she becomes a less and less sympathetic character. In the final trilogy, there is a more hard-eyed, unsentimental view of sex and relationships, as one might expect of a more mature author writing in times when homosexuality is far more widely accepted.
Overall, Tales of the City and its sequels can be read as an era-spanning epic, charting the lives of sympathetic characters making their way through their times, and in this its great strength is the large cast of characters built up mainly in the original novel. The last three sequels are probably mostly of interest to readers who fell in love with the characters in the early books (only the ninth one could really stand on its own for a new reader). But the peak, for me, is the exact middle of the series, Significant Others, for its optimistic tone, clever plot and interesting backdrop, and perhaps for its balance between the hedonism of youth and the weariness of age. I don’t suggest picking it up first: start at the start, but do keep going as far as this sequel, it’s worth it. They’re all fun to read up to this point, and I would recommend them to anyone. They’re certainly straight-reader-friendly: lots of the characters are straight and the sex scene which I mentioned last week is the most explicit, as far as I recall, in the first five books.
If I’ve inspired anyone to read them for the first time, please do let me know what you think, by email or in the comments below. In terms of our journey through Sequel Country, we’re still hacking through the steamy jungles of sex and LGBT+ writing, and I’ll be sending a drone up to look at the wider landscape next week. Until then, happy reading.