Mary Ann in Autumn

I have a lot to catch up on here, there's so much I want to write about. I suppose I'll have to just take it one post at a time.

Let's start with Mary Ann in Autumn, the new Tales of the City novel by Armistead Maupin. If you've followed my blog at all, you know that I'd been looking forward to this book for quite awhile now.

I picked up my copy the day it came out, of course, and I pretty much devoured it all in one sitting. Maupin definitely still has the touch when it comes to weaving an engaging tale.

Reading this novel (and the earlier update, Michael Tolliver Lives) was very much like running into people you dearly loved in the past but haven't had the chance to see in ages. You may worry at first that too much will have changed in the ensuing years, but you quickly discover how easy it is to fall right back into your old rapport.

Don't think for a second, though, that Maupin is only interested in the characters that he first created over thirty years ago. In his two latest updates to the series he's introduced a new generation of characters to catch our interest and he's been able to seamlessly intertwine their lives with those of the classic characters.

Mary Ann in Autumn focuses, as you'd imagine, on the character of Mary Ann Singleton. In the original series of books, she was the character who arrived in San Francisco from Cleveland, wide eyed and naive. Mary Ann ended up being the character who most personified the times she lived in, going from the open hearted and free spirited 1970's to the ambitious and self obsessed 1980's.

Maupin managed to actually make this change in Mary Ann feel quite natural. Looking back, you saw that the seeds of it were always there. It still hurt, though, to get to the end of the series (as Sure of You was for so many years) and to feel just as abandoned by Mary Ann as her friends and family in the books did when she left them behind to pursue success in New York.

When the series was updated in 2005 with Michael Tolliver Lives Mary Ann was largely absent, with the exception of a telling cameo appearance toward the end. We learned at that point that she'd continued to mirror the changing times by becoming an upper class suburban wife in Connecticut who hadn't seen her San Francisco friends in years.

Mary Ann in Autumn, then, is the first real chance to catch up with this particular character as she returns to San Francisco in the face of both health and marital crises.

The book takes place in December of 2008, when the country is still hopeful over the recent election of Senator Obama to the White House but California itself is reeling from the passage of Proposition 8. One of the younger characters, in fact, is a sexually confused Mormon who'd been in town on a mission to help pass the law.

As with any Tales novel, there is no shortage of intrigue or heartfelt moments, mixed in with a lot of laughs and plenty of wisdom dispensed from Mrs. Madrigal.

I loved the book. I loved getting to know Mary Ann all over again and discovering that the ambitious woman who'd left everything behind for the sake of her career was still very much present, but that the open hearted young girl who'd first arrived in San Francisco was there, too. They were, in fact, very much the same person.

In the first books, I tended to identify with her as the outsider coming into this new world. Maybe that's why it was so hard when she later turned her back on the world I'd come to love, why it seemed so unforgivable to me.

I picked up the new book hoping that Mary Ann would be redeemed in my eyes as a character, but I quickly realized that she didn't need redemption. In the end, Mary Ann is simply a woman who has made her decisions in life, for better or worse, just as we all do. Maybe being a bit older myself than I was when I read the original six books is part of why I can see that so clearly now.

I hope that this won't be the last of the Tales novels. There is still a lot of story to be told, both with the original characters and the newer ones. If it is the final book, though, I will at least be glad that I finally came to a new understanding of Mary Ann.