This book is delightful reading easily enjoyed on several different levels. As summer reading, light and breezy, Maupin paints a tale…flip, amusing, and wry. But he does far more than “just entertain”…creating characters who struggle with need to assert identity, stay true to one’s own personal moral imperatives, and work out a variety of internal conflicts.
Maupin’s protagonist, a true heroine, is Cadence Roth, a twenty-something little person, just 29 inches tall. With deft storytelling Maupin mixes the real with the fictional creating a “faux” cinemagraphic history so real that the reader wonders how these “classic” films never came to his town.
Cady hit it big in years past as the actress who inhabited the costume/construct of Mr. Woods, a delightful, we are told, elf who won the hearts of the movie going public. Created by Philip Blenheim, I read this as referring the Spielberg’s’ blockbuster of yesteryear…E. T.
Cady’s career has gone nowhere after Mr. Woods (in which she never appeared as herself) and we learn of her longings, her needs and her desires to assert herself as herself through journals which she had begun writing.
Cady has a gay activist/writer friend, Jeff, who, along with a now adult Mr. Woods co-star, Callum, creates a strong secondary plot line. Issues of the California gay community in the early 1990s are deftly handled, lucidly delivered and gracefully woven into the more important story of Cady’s need…right actually, to be recognized for who she really is…and respected for it.
Cady’s attempts to find work, doing even children’s birthday parties are an inspiration. She never loses her dignity. Asked to perform in a film student’s video she reluctantly agrees only to learn that the project was destroyed just when she might become recognized for herself. Attending the film student’s funeral she attains a sort of near recognition as a singer but it’s too little too late. Yet out of that event she continues to grow, persevering to the end.
Funny and witty this story is ultimately sad if not truly tragic. Cady’s best effort to assert herself almost happens. In not quite happening she stands to gain more as there is potential for her life story to be immortalize as a mainstream movie…
There’s much more to the plot, none of it dull.
In the past I reviewed a more recent work of fiction by the same author, The Night Listener. Having read the more recent stuff first I expected to find Maybe the Moon less mature. Not so! So solid is Maupin’s writing skill that both works, although written years apart, seem as fresh and fully developed as if written last month.
What Maupin does exceptionally well is delve into the human experiences of loss, disappointment, assertiveness, and personal growth. The Night Listener did this as part of a plot involving a gay middle-aged man. Maybe the Moon did the same thing earlier but was less focused on the gay issue… dealing more generally with the human experience. Cady, as small person, is an outsider in the same sense that all minorities sense alienation?
As a spokesperson for minorities generally (including the gay community) she is admirable.
Maybe the Moon is a book to read. No equivocation here. I found nothing in this novel to dislike or to whine about; it’s all good. It’s surely a candidate for my personal list of “Top Ten Favorite Gay Themed Books.” If you get to read it, I’m willing to bet you won’t be disappointed.