The Long, Strange Trip of Mary Ann Singleton
Toward the end of the novel Michael Tolliver sets off in search of Mary Ann Singleton, the heart and soul of those tales of the city which preceded his self-narrated adventure. Mary Ann has since leaving the Bohemian San Francisco of the 1970’s and 1980’s settled in Darien, Connecticut. The irony of the metaphor is unavoidable:
“That place is a hotbed of cautious white people. It’s where they shot The Stepford Wives, you know. Both versions of it.”
Mouse
In those tales of the 70’s in San Francisco, Tolliver became as likely to be called Mouse as Michael. As part of the book’s overall thematic sense of aging and change, there is a call back to those when he casually addressed at one point:
“That nickname always feels like a shout from the past.”
A Man and a Girl
Times change. Sometimes a lot. Even that which was absolute unique in San Francisco in the 1970’s could by the 21st century become something much less so. Even Anna Madrigal.
“I couldn’t help remembering that Anna had struck me as the rarest of birds all those years ago, yet here she was now, just one among the many.”
The US Festival
It is one of the great ironies of entertainment that a massive music concert which managed to include Gang of Four, The Kinks, The Police, Tom Petty, Oingo Boingo and The English Beat will forever be describe by nearly everybody in roughly the exact same terms. But there it is:
“It was sort of like Woodstock, I guess, but a lot more calculated and commercial.”
Shawna
Shawna is Mary Ann Singleton’s adopted daughter, a pansexual and a blogger. For Michael, however, she is something that penetrates much deeper into the recesses of his psyche and his history since those tales of this days back in the city:
“Shawna is my karma, I suppose, my just desserts for banking too blindly on the power of my own liberation.”
