If you missed last year's The Serial and worry about it, here's
another long-running serialized newspaper soap peopled with the
intertwined archetypes of the San Francisco ethos: Do anything, do
it often, and make sure it's a cliche before making a firm
commitment to it. This is satire at its second-best, the author
having caught the nuances of stereotypical mod America, down to
Vitabath, mescaline, phrases like "cosmic plasticity," and outworn
hippiedom. The characters - all too real in their unrelenting
banality - are woven into a plot that centers around Anna
Madrigal's apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane. Her tenants include
Mary Ann Singleton, who has a brief affair with Beauchamp Days. His
wife, DeDe (nee Halcyon), is made pregnant by a Japanese delivery
boy and so goes to gay gynecologist Jon Fielding, who is sleeping
with her husband Beauchamp and has had an affair with Michael Mouse
Tolliver, who lives with his friend Mona, at Mrs. Madrigal's. Which
is a neat package, when you consider that Mrs. Madrigal is having
an affair with Edgar Halcyon, who is Beauchamp's father-in-law and
Mary Ann's boss. Add to that a one-eared crisis center volunteer
named Vincent and Mona's lesbian lover D'Orothea Williams - a black
model who was white but took Black Like Me pills so she could get
jobs. It's bad enough to have to live in a world full of joggers,
poetry-spouting dope-smokers, disappointed matrons, and advertising
executives. It virtually hurts to read about them; but, for faddish
masochists - absolutely comic. (Kirkus Reviews)
NAMED AS ONE OF THE BBC'S 100 MOST INSPIRING NOVELS Now a Netflix
series starring Elliot Page and Laura Linney . . . 'It's an odd
thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San
Francisco.' Oscar Wilde Mary Ann is twenty-five and arrives in San
Francisco for an eight-day holiday. But then her Mood Ring turns
blue. So obviously she decides to stay. It is the 1970s after all.
Fresh out of Cleveland, naive Mary Ann tumbles headlong into a
brave new world of pot-growing landladies, cut throat debutantes,
spaced-out neighbours and outrageous parties. Finding a job as a
secretary at an ad agency, Mary Ann wants to start her own life,
away from her parents and with the flower-power freedom to make her
own friends and her own decisions. The saga that ensues introduces
vignettes that are manic, romantic, tawdry and touching -
unmistakably the handiwork of Armistead Maupin.
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