Tales of the City

Before malls were plonked down on the Indian landscape and rising incomes made internet shopping possible, plenty of things one lusted after were unavailable in the country.  Happily these included bad 80s fashion (modelled by Mses. Cates, Ringwald and Houston in Seventeen, which magazine inexplicably turned up regularly at the circulating library, thus creating unfulfilled teen desires - though a few decades later I am happy no picture of mine in fishnet bracelets or leg warmers exists). Unhappily these included plenty of books, amongst them Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. I therefore just got around to reading the first novel and enjoyed it a great deal. Maupin's milieu of late 70s San Francisco might have dated but the sweetness and charm of the book hasn't. The book was serialised in the San Francisco Chronicle much like a Dickens novel so the chapters are short and self-contained. Maupin's tale of half a dozen tenants in a building with a somewhat eccentric and bohemian landlady could have been as sprawling and crowded a novel as any of Dickens or Balzac's but isn't. But it is vastly amusing and tender in its depiction of louche bohemia in a particular city at a particular point in time. It is that rare thing, a book you want to read all over again once finished.  Now to hunt down the remaining books in the series.

As a post script, at one point, talking of the future, one of the characters in the book states "we are gonna be fifty year old libertines in a world full of twenty year old Calvinists." It is interesting that Maupin is now married and no one would be surprised if some 20 year old decided to post their sex tape on facebook :-)