Tales of the City
Sometimes an innocent notion has unintended consequences.
For instance, the whole premise of Read + Roam is that traveling is richer and more rewarding when the books you’re reading correspond with the cities you’re visiting. But sometimes my desire to pair prose and place takes me on strange literary detours, leading me to books I normally wouldn’t look twice at. Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin’s homage to San Francisco in the 70s, is one of those strange detours.
Tales of the City is a novel borne from the little column that could. What began as a series of short stories in the San Francisco Chronicle was then combined into a novel, which then gave rise to eight additional books, a TV series starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis, and a Broadway musical. Now Netflix is developing a 10-part Tales of the City series, with Linney and Dukakis reprising their respective roles. Tales of the City is basically a San Francisco juggernaut, and it appears on just about every ‘must read books when you’re in the Bay Area’ list. That’s how I ended up down the rabbit hole of this pulpy, soap-operatic read – a book of co-dependent neighbors, dire circumstances, and petty dramas. Tales of the City is the Love Actually of books, with meet-cutes around every corner and characters’ lives cleverly co-mingling. Its chapters, meanwhile, are so short they give Dan Brown a run for his money. They also have the sort of ridiculous titles that left me a bit embarrassed to read this book in public. They range from “Connie’s Bummer Night” to “At the Gynecologist’s,” to “At the Fat Farm.”
Tales of the City begins when Mary Ann Singleton – the platonic ideal of a Midwestern good girl – moves from Cleveland to the coast and into 28 Barbary Lane, an apartment building bursting with crazy tenants and run by a nurturing, pot-growing, landlord-cum-mother-figure. It’s a fish-out-of-water story, marked by Mary Ann asking herself, “Would she ever stop feeling like a colonist on the moon?” The novel tips back and forth between San Francisco’s seedy underbelly – its bathhouse orgies, casual drug use, and pickup culture – and comparatively innocent quirks of the city ranging from rolfing to mantras to biorhythms. Quotes include observations such as “You’re into TM and I’m into est. It’ll never work.” I had to Google both.
The book is also chock full of highly specific San Francisco references from a time when Russian hill was ramshackle, when meditation retreats and transcendentalism reigned, and when experimenting with Moroccan tagines and downers was de rigueur. The Bay Area in the 70s is preserved like amber in Maupin’s prose:
“A girl like that was out gettin’ down ... boogying and boozing and nibbling on the Brut-flavored ear of a junior Bechtel exec with a 240Z, a trimaran in Tiburon, and a condominium at Sea Ranch.”
”Jerry something. A German name. Buckskin pants and a turquoise squash blossom necklace and a pair of those John Denver glasses. Gorgeous in a ... you know ... Marin kind of way.”
Silly as this novel was, I delighted in many of its light-as-air witticisms – flirtatious discussions of the logic-defying pronunciation of city landmarks such as Ghirardelli Square and Kearny Streets, the introduction of a couple named Splinter and Oona, and descriptions of 28 Barbary Lane as “a well-weathered, tree-story structure made of brown shingles that made Mary Ann think of an old bear with bits of foliage caught in its fur.” In Maupin’s world, “they’re very Piedmont” is a pejorative term, people have job titles such as “wood butcher,” and people can be found “flashing an uneven row of Vuitton-colored teeth.” In Tales of the City, when characters encounter fog they’re more likely than not to say aloud (and without apparent irony) that it makes them feel like they’re in a Dashiell Hammett book.
One fascinating element of this otherwise frothy book is how it hints at the future to come for San Francisco. At one point, Mary Ann wonders, “So what’s next? What will come along to take the place of free clinics and crisis switchboards and alternative newspapers and macrobiotic everything?” Though she didn’t know the answer, we all do now. And for the contrast between old and new San Francisco alone, this fun novel is worth a frolic.