Customer Reviews

The Night Listener: A Novel

5 star:		(70)
4 star:		(34)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I was so excited to hear the Armistad Maupin was coming out with another book. After reading and hearing about it, I decided to pick up a 3-part gally of his book at a bookstore I work for. Seriously, this only took me one sitting. The story surrounds a NPR radio host, Grabriel Noone, who was going through writer's block. In addition to his difficulty in writing, his boyfriend left him. After reading a gally written by a 12-year-old boy, who is a fan of Gabriel's funny and lyrical radio show, Gabriel contacts the ill-fated boy, named Pete, and becomes friends with him. As their friendship progresses, Gabriel starts telling Pete his problems and hardships in his life. Pete listens and gives advice to Gabriel, which helps him. BUT, the question is: DOES this boy exist? Is Pete an actual person? With many people doubting Pete's extistence, Gabriel goes out to find pete, and prove he exists. This is a FANTASTIC piece of work from Armistad Maupin. Gabriel goes through a journey of life, in dealing with his ex-boyfriend, his family (particuarly his father), and himself. THE NIGHT LISTENER is a triumph, with a climax that will make you think and wonder for days. This is one book you will have a hard time putting down, let alone wishing it never ended.

This book was startlingly good. Not that I would ever think that Armistead Maupin could write a book I wouldn't like (he could write a book about paint drying and it would be interesting in some way), but I was wondering if I'd find the story as interesting as the TOTC series.

After reading a couple of chapters, thinking I'd finish it upon returning home, I was hooked. Before I knew it I had read 1/2 the book. I finished it the next night. When I was done, I was in shock. I have read many books, but NONE have ever made me feel the emotions I felt reading this book. No book ever made me actually cry, and for an extended period of time too.

People should read this book even if they think its subject matter (gay relationships, child abuse, famous authors, etc.) would not appeal to them.

I'm not gay, I don't know anyone who has been abused like Pete Lomax was as a child, and I am not a published author, and yet I found this book and the emotions and feelings it described were universal themes relevant to my own life and things I was going through at the time I bought the book and previously. It was a very moving experience .

Maupin is such an expert at blurring the lines between the truth and fiction. Can this be based on his own life, or is it just more fiction and not really fact? We really don't know when we are done reading this book, but what a wonderful experience it is. Maupin's books are always full of surprises, and this one is no exception. If you want closure when you read this book, you are going to be disappointed. However, that can be good because when you're done reading this book, you're going to be really thinking and wondering for a long time about the details of this story, and that's the sign of a great book that you're not going to forget. There is nothing predictable here, and I promise you that you won't be able to put the book down till you're finished. I didn't. It's a very touching story, full of emotion, and lots of love. Gabriel Noone's emotional relationship in helping an ailing thirteen year old boy, Pete Lomax, who has suffered terrible abuse by the hands of his parents, is a very moving story.

Armistead Maupin is one of the best authors we have today. I always look forward to his next book. Now I just want to know when the movie will be released!!!

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.

I saw Armistead Maupin read from this (then unpublished)novel during the spring of 1999 in London. (Ian McKellan was in the audience, just days after losing the Oscar for "Gods and Monsters"). I knew hearing the first chapters that this was going to be a special book, and I waited a year and a half to finally get my hands on a finished copy. It did not disappoint. Let me highlight some of what the other reviews overlooked: for one, this novel includes a cameo appearance by a couple of AM's better known characters (hint: they were kids during the "Tales" books) and has an twist-in-the-tale ending that is classic Maupin. In fact the entire book is a reminder of what made the "Tales" series so irresistable: like a literary hologram, the characters in AM's books are often not what they appear to be, or are they? I can see what Maupin is going for here: our need for face value trust belies the greater truth of the humanity that lies beneath the surface of our packaging. The fact that he writes about this truth with a gentle touch makes the realization all the more moving. This book is a great comeback, completely worth the wait.

The reviews I have read miss the fact that book is a true story about what Armistad Maupin when through in his dealings with Anthony Godby Johnson the 14 year old who wrote A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy's Triumphant Story.

The contraversy with this book is not whether what Armistad Maupin went through was fact or fiction it's whether Anthony Godby Johnson is real or not. I urge you to read both books and do a little research on the case, it gets more interesting the more research and reading you do.

The first mistake that a Maupin fan can make going into "The Night Listener" is to think it is going to be like the "Tales" series or even "Maybe The Moon." "Tales" is over 20 years ago and Maupin's last novel "Moon" is nearing a decade old. Maupin is cleary in a different stage in life (and who would not be after all those years) and that is reflected in the tone and style of this book. While "Tales" could be eaten up voraciously like a bag of potato chips, "The Night Listener" is more like sitting down for a meal.

But to continue you that analogy, initially I was not sure how much I was liking this meal. The characters were not very likeable (unlike "Tales" where the characters really were "old friends" over time) and Maupin's approach to gay characters/issues was much more direct (heavy handed at times) than before. Likewise, the speedy escalation of the "father-son" relationship that develops between the main character (Gabriel Noone), and the young writer(Pete Lomax) was a bit offputting.

But Maupin tends not to disappoint and about halfway through the book he throws us one of his characteristic curve-balls that certainly kept me flipping pages much more quickly through the remainder of the book (and another doozy of a twist at the end). Also, for "Tales" fans there is a nice surprise connection revealed as well.

Unlike other Maupin works, I found myself thinking more about things a book club might discuss (the character/pure plot-driven "Tales" series would never make the cut for a book club selection). Who is "The Night Listener?" Many characters take on that role. The blur between fact-and-fiction (from what I know of his "personal" life Maupin is very much a twin of Gabriel) and furthermore fantasy-vs-reality. Some readers will be frustrated with the lack of resolution (we never do know the "truth"), but life itself never gives us all of the answers. So after some initial concerns, "The Night Listener" delivered. One hopes that Gabriel Noone's writer's block is just a figment of Maupin's imagination and that we don't have to wait too long for his next novel.

Refreshingly, now and then a book is released that reminds us what the art of telling stories is all about. Maupin's newest success in the field of novel birthing does just that ...and so very much more. The Night Listener is a FINE mystery/love story/reminiscence and as such it is diffficult to stop turning the pages, so involved is the unwinding of the tale.

But to my eyes and mind this book is so much more than just a well-told tale complete with allegory and metaphor. This book studies the achingly long, ever-present clash of father/son relationships. Whether concocted as an adoptive father in search of a needy youth as in this book, or just examining the way all men are challenged by this complicated love/hate, approach/avoid, mimic/revolt interaction we live through as sons and subsequently as fathers, Maupin serves us a study of one of the core dilemmas we face.

And as for the structure of this immensley rewarding novel, Maupin has given us the choices to determine our own resolutions about his beautifully drawn characters. In the early pages of the book he admits that his way of relating stories is always altered by flights of fancy, or "bejeweling an elephant"; that his tale takes us on such a kaleidoscopic ride is enhanced by his starting out with this sort of honesty. And in truth, isn't this the way we all electively distort history as we relate it.... to fulfill our hope and fantansies of how we actually exist? Thank you, Armistead Maupin, for another jewel of a tale!

I have not often been so uncomfortable reading a novel. On the surface, the book is about a writer and his relationship with an abused and ill teenager who exists only in a draft novel and as a disembodied voice over the phone line. In fact, it's really about a writer struggling with his recent and bewildering break-up, with his own middle-age and his blossoming self-awareness and dawning humility. I squirmed, put the book aside, did the dishes, read, walked the dog and picked it up again to get through it headlong and finally. I liked that that the protagonist is not very endearing. He's intelligent and sweet (Maupin could not write a bitter character!) of course but he's also arrogant, pushy and relatively unaware of the feelings, needs and efforts of the people who love him. There are truly wonderful but brief depictions that moved and interested me: his lover Jess, the aged dog Hugo, the bi-sexual truck driver and especially the writer's mother. Unfortunately, not being a story about these interesting people, we are constantly drawn back to this hammering saga of a writer struggling with his own humility and powerlessness. This is too much personal surgery out of which to make an interesting novel.

Many fiction authors have a tendency, after writing a number of books to feel predictable and formulaic. Not so Maupin in this work. Here the characters are less robust than in previous volumes, the plot less intricate yet the emotional involvement of the reader, almost because of the lightness of touch becomes more intense. Here is a story where only the hardest of hearts will remain untouched. It is the readers imagination that is given free rein, an experience usually associated with radio listening! An excellent read, spellbinding stuff! ( I can almost plot the sequel Mmmm?)