days_unfolding

Still not feeling completely well. Not sure how I'm going to play things. (Need to call my mom and talk about how to play the next couple of days. The time has gone by fast.)

I didn't get as much sleep as I intended though. I made the big mistake of picking up Armistead Maupin's latest, The Night Listener, as I went to sleep, and I couldn't put it down. The reviewer who said that the story "is something along the lines of a soap opera for the articulate" was right on.

The premise is that a writer who wrote a series of novels that were first read on a radio show is breaking up with his HIV+ partner. At the same time, the writer receives a manuscript from a boy who was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and has AIDS. The boy says that he was a fan of the radio show and it kept him going through some tough times. The boy calls the writer, and he becomes family of a sort...with some unexpected results.

I found the story really gripping and moving. I think that the story works on its own merits, but I found the various layers of reality mixed with fiction to be interesting.

Some people on Amazon.com found the premise of the boy to be unreal. That part of story is true, but it happened to Paul Monette, not Maupin (unless the boy contacted Maupin too). Several years ago, a boy wrote a book called A Rock and a Hard Place, about surviving childhood sexual abuse and living with AIDS. Paul Monette wrote the foreword to the book. Because no one had met Tony, Monette was accused of writing the book and perpetuating a hoax.

The main character of The Night Listener (the writer) is clearly modeled after Maupin, and the writer's partner is clearly modeled after Maupin's partner of many years, Terry Anderson. However, the book also has some Maupin-as-Monette references: as well as the story of the boy, the book references an essay about a dog that Monette wrote (in Last Watch of the Night, which also contained an essay about the Tony controversy), not Maupin. And a couple of characters from Maupin's Tales of the City books show up as characters in this book.

Several years ago, David Leavitt wrote a story called the "The Term Paper Artist" (in Arkansas) in which Leavitt created a character called David Leavitt who wrote term papers for hunky graduate students in exchange for sex. Major, major uproar over that story. I took it as hilarious farce, personally, and thought that people were taking it way too seriously. "The Term Paper Artist," in turn, was written in response to a flap about Leavitt's novel While England Sleeps, which a lawsuit claimed was based on a memoir by Stephen Spender.

Got that? There will be a quiz later.

While "The Term Paper Artist" was farce, The Night Listener is something close to elegy. Again, I think the story stands on its own. However, you can look at the literary references as Maupin's homage to other authors, at least one of which (Paul Monette) is gone.

Well worth reading.