When Private Pain Becomes Public Tragedy…

…is this what drives pity?

From Gwendoline Riley’s Cold Water, which I've just about finished reading:

“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this….This woman came in, fifty-odd, on her own, and she was trying it on with every bloke in the place, sitting next to them and they’d ignore her. Mr. Henrik was stood talking to Bob at the door and they were taking the piss, laughing at her. She started dancing on her own and they started clapping. And I was kind of taking the piss too because I just thought: old lush with maroon hair. Sorry….But I can’t stop thinking about it, I couldn't get to sleep all last night. All she wanted was a bit of fucking company. God it’s awful. We were all being shitty to her and she realised, that’s…that’s the thing, suddenly she knew and she came up to the bar and said to me, Why are you doing this?”

I finished reading Armistead Maupin’s Michael Tolliver Lives a couple of nights ago. I did not like it. It was rather a loathsome book in some respects—cruel, snobbish, pious, and more about Armistead Maupin than Michael Tolliver. In fact, I really couldn't see one iota of similarity between the Michael Tolliver of this book and the Michael Tolliver of the previous entries in the Tales of the City series. The disconnect was so profound that a few pages into the book I just started taking it for granted that Michael was a stand-in for Mr. Maupin. (I learned many, many things about Mr. Maupin, not least of which is that he has a younger lover, I mean husband, who is a bottom.) I found this new book to be almost completely lacking in the easy charm which made the original Tales of the City novels (at least the first two or three) so diverting. Mr. Maupin has gotten spiteful and provincial in his old age, and his pride in his supposedly open-minded bohemianism is revoltingly smug. Particularly grating was one scene in particular where Michael and Ben, down in Orlando visiting Michael’s dying mother, slip off to a gay bar. They repair themselves out to the garden area behind the bar to get some fresh air and on their way back in pass a couple of men sharing a joint. When these two strangers hurriedly try to hide their dope Michael laughs and says “Don’t worry, we’re from San Francisco.” Because, you know, nobody but Bay Area residents are quite so urbane about these things. I couldn't help but think, “What an asshole!” And then there were the constant asides about Bush, about the inarguable stupidity of the Iraq war, about how stupid and tacky and tasteless red staters are, and about how much more wise and sophisticated gays are than straights when it comes to love and relationships, blah blah blah. Michael Tolliver Lives is really more of an exercise in axe-grinding than story-telling. And while I am not necessarily the biggest fan of the Tales of the City series and so had insanely low expectations, this still somehow managed to be a total disappointment.