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THE NIGHT LISTENER Armistead Maupin 9780593036532 Books

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THE NIGHT LISTENER Armistead Maupin 9780593036532 Books

Armistead Maupin is a master story teller. I remember reading the first "Tales of the City" book and feeling that I was lost in a magical world. A feeling that no book has replicated for me, until the Harry Potter stories.
Now Maupin returns with "The Night Listener", a book that seems closer to his own life story than anything he has previously written.
In it his narrator, Gabriel Noone is a novelist struggling with writers block, and a breakup of his long term relationship with Jess, his former lover. After a publisher sends him the galley of a nonfiction book about a young boy, Pete Lomax, who was horribly abused sexually, he develops a friendship with the boy via the telephone. As their relationship grows, Gabriel and Pete develop a surrogate father son bond. This causes Gabriel to question his relationship with his own father, while at the same time resorting the scattered puzzle that was his life with Jess. Suddenly Maupin concocts a scenerio for a genuine page turning mystery as Gabriel attempts to discover the truth about Pete.
The premise for the book is where the headtrip started for me, in part because Maupin so successfully blurs the lines between truth and fiction. The boys' story, which is loosely recounted in the novel, appears to be verbatim from a book called, 'A Rock and a Hard Place'. I had read the book years ago, and was deeply moved by it. At the time it was published it created a stir because many people wondered if the eloquent and brave boy actually existed. A similar scenario wields its's head here. Maupin also recently split from his longtime companion, Terry Anderson on whom the character Jess might be based. The fun of all this is never really knowing what's fact or fiction. Maupin seems to be deliberately bluring the reality line between his own life, and the lives he created in "Tales..." by inserting a character from the "Tales..." series to layer the book like an onion skin. Maupin's Gabriel Noone says he's a "fabulist by trade" who's "spent years looting his life for fiction." Again, that could be the character talking or the author. Regardless, we as the readers are richer for it.


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THE NIGHT LISTENER Armistead Maupin 9780593036532 Books Reviews

I am giving this book 5 stars because the writing is superb, could not be any better, is the best example this side of Nabokov of what GREAT writing means. Maupin could be in the room with me, telling me this story, and I would listen to every single word he was saying because they are all interesting and important to the story.

That said, I will admit that I have had this book for some time, knowing it received glowing reviews, but only now picked it up because of the upcoming movie with Robin Williams. Actually, I almost cringe picturing how Williams will play this role what with his sugar-coated portrayals of "serious" characters in the "serious" films he has done over the past several years. In fact, I may not even see the movie.....

I knew what this book was about before reading it, and I must admit that probably the real reason I left it on my shelf until now is that I know that Maupin inserts graphic gay sexual scenes which I have never felt were necessary to the story. Remember the movies of the 30s and 40s and 50s where a kiss and a look and the music told us what was to come rather than the graphic sex in movies today? Well, that is what this book is like for me. We know how he feels about his lover who has left, we know he is not particularly adventurous in his sex life, but please, do we have to have it drawn and quartered for us? We are intelligent readers. We don't need it. I tried to skip over it when I came to it (like the scene at the truck stop..... not necessary, in my opinion). This is probably the lone fact that keeps Armistead Maupin from being one of our best-read writers today.

That said, the story of the night listener, a 13 year old boy, is fascinating and grabs from the beginning. I've read criticism of the ending in some of these reviews, but I guess I was okay with the ending. When you give it some thought, the reader will realize that any other ending would be very dramatic and probably anti-climactic.

For anyone looking for a really great yarn, this is for you! I am glad I finally read it.
From the start of "The Night Listener", Armistead Maupin warns us he's going to be taking more than a few liberties with reality, a bit of "jewelling the elephant" as he, and his protagonist Gabriel Noone, like to say.
Noone, a writer and NPR staple (think of a gay Garrison Keilor) finds a kindred bruised spirit in Pete Lomax, a teen boy stricken with the AIDS virus and recovering mentally and physically from a ghastly childhood of rape and abuse at the hands of his parents.
As the connection between this makeshift father and son grows stronger, a pseudoreality quite like the one that exists in Noone's radio show (and personal life) begins to evolve, which makes it all the more difficult to shake once the links between reality and logic become ever more brittle.
Going way beyond the scope of a label as narrow as "gay fiction", Maupin crafts a story so utterly original that it's impossible to connect it's power to one source or subculture.
His characters live and breathe in the harsh realities of turn-of-the-millennia cynicism yet have enough heart to clearly examine their own selves and, at times, their less than selfless motives.
Everything about this book crackles with life and love.
Armistead Maupin is a master story teller. I remember reading the first "Tales of the City" book and feeling that I was lost in a magical world. A feeling that no book has replicated for me, until the Harry Potter stories.
Now Maupin returns with "The Night Listener", a book that seems closer to his own life story than anything he has previously written.
In it his narrator, Gabriel Noone is a novelist struggling with writers block, and a breakup of his long term relationship with Jess, his former lover. After a publisher sends him the galley of a nonfiction book about a young boy, Pete Lomax, who was horribly abused sexually, he develops a friendship with the boy via the telephone. As their relationship grows, Gabriel and Pete develop a surrogate father son bond. This causes Gabriel to question his relationship with his own father, while at the same time resorting the scattered puzzle that was his life with Jess. Suddenly Maupin concocts a scenerio for a genuine page turning mystery as Gabriel attempts to discover the truth about Pete.
The premise for the book is where the headtrip started for me, in part because Maupin so successfully blurs the lines between truth and fiction. The boys' story, which is loosely recounted in the novel, appears to be verbatim from a book called, 'A Rock and a Hard Place'. I had read the book years ago, and was deeply moved by it. At the time it was published it created a stir because many people wondered if the eloquent and brave boy actually existed. A similar scenario wields its's head here. Maupin also recently split from his longtime companion, Terry Anderson on whom the character Jess might be based. The fun of all this is never really knowing what's fact or fiction. Maupin seems to be deliberately bluring the reality line between his own life, and the lives he created in "Tales..." by inserting a character from the "Tales..." series to layer the book like an onion skin. Maupin's Gabriel Noone says he's a "fabulist by trade" who's "spent years looting his life for fiction." Again, that could be the character talking or the author. Regardless, we as the readers are richer for it.