SOURCE: "Larger Than Life," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4688, February 5, 1993, p. 19.

The author of States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), White is an American educator, novelist, essayist, and critic. In the following review, he describes Maupin's dialogue in Maybe the Moon as "crisp" and discusses the development of both the major and minor characters.

In the 1960s, it was fashionable to define a work of art as a machine for creating sensations. If so, Maybe the Moon (a deliberately corny title invented by a Hollywood producer in the novel) is an extremely efficient machine for producing sensations of pleasure, suspense, pathos and a highly critical kind of irony.

Armistead Maupin is a consummate entertainer who has made a generation laugh with his six-volume San Francisco saga, Tales of the City. If this time out he's more cutting, the change in tone may be ascribed to his...