Showing how far behind I’ve gotten in my reading, I just finished Gregory Maguire’s late 2009 release The Next Queen of Heaven.

If you’ve poked around my site, you know Maguire is a literary hero of mine (maybe you noticed a particular sidebar icon).   My appreciation for Maguire is manifold:   his intricately re-imagined fairytale worlds, and the sly twists therein; his sense of humor—a winning combination of absurdity and crotchitiness; and his expert rendering of hapless anti-heroes.

The Next Queen of Heaven has all of these peculiarities to recommend it.   Even as a departure from Maguire’s retold fairytale stock, there’s still a backdrop of magic and myth, vis-a-vis the Virgin Mary and the simmering possibility of another Christmas “miracle” in the works.

A little synopsis:   40-something, thrice divorced Leontina Scales is desperately concerned about her 18-year-old daughter Tabitha, a foul-mouthed, intractable, near drop-out high school senior with a knack for sleeping around with small town losers.   So Leontina stages a paradoxical intervention.   She’ll show Tabitha the error of her ways by shaming her with a strong dose of bad behavior.   But the plan is thwarted when Leontina gets accidentally hit over the head by a falling Virgin Mary statuette, rendering her aphasic and unable to care for herself (or, maybe it was all part of her plan).

Not a bad premise, and combined with the setting—the marginal upstate New York town of “Thebes,” that’s inching toward Y2K with angsty superstition—things start off with plenty of quirky narrative drive.

I laughed out loud quite a bit while reading, particularly during Tabitha’s wry, fatalistic observations, and a hilarious Christmas pageant scene that is some of Maguire’s best literary humor ever.

In a sense, he’s freer to take things to extremes with an original story.   And, at the same time, there’s an added relatability to his contemporary characters.   Passages about Tabitha’s discovery of sexual pleasure, with the local bad news-heartthrob Caleb, are haltingly vivid (not graphic).   Brought in later to the story is co-protagonist Jeremy Carr, who can’t break free of a shattered love affair, or the small town Catholic community where his gayness is a dirty secret.  He’s the kind of guy most of us know, or have known.   The denizens of tNQoH’s Thebes are each uniquely handicapped by personal hang-ups, but not meanly so.   Even the homophobes, like Tabitha’s brother Hogan, manage to achieve a measure of redemption in their earnest, if misguided pursuits.

They’re doing the best they can with what life dealt them.

Maguire’s break into contemporary, realistic fiction (realistic applied loosely:::things approach send-up on occasion) is not without its uneven moments, however.   Things start out quick, drag in the middle a bit, then pick up nicely.

It’s an issue of the narrative drive not quite meeting the demands of the subject.   A degree of character floundering by Elphaba in Wicked, or Liir in Son of a Witch, worked well for Maguire’s epically lost heroes, where the scale of personal, even philosophical, discovery was vast.   But in a modern context, where the characters’ problems are “smaller” and more familiar, the meandering character journeys get a little sluggish.

For a good part of the story, Tabitha is on a search for Caleb, who has clearly moved on from their sexually-charged relationship, and I was anxious for her to move on too.   Same thing with Jeremy, who is shown in repeated scenes of passive snits with the guy who dumped him.

A plot diversion in which Jeremy’s gay men’s chorus (actually, a trio) has to negotiate rehearsal space at a neglected convent—the Sisters of Sorrowful Mysteries—provides a clever observation about what gays and nuns have in common in a heteronormative society.   But it doesn’t quite hit the wacky heights of life with the Maunts of the Cloister of Saint Glinda from the Wicked trilogy, of which it is a rather plain derivative; nor does it serve such a critical purpose.

As Maguire’s first work that explicitly deals with modern gay and bisexual men and their troubles, tNQoH treads familiar themes—AIDS, loneliness, estrangement from family—but the delivery is matter-of-fact and ultimately heart-warming.

Tabitha’s younger brother Kirk, the beleaguered “good son” of the family, is immensely charming, and a spot-on portrait of queer coming of age.   The bisexuality of Willem, Jeremy’s old flame, is handled equitably and effectively, forgoing a typical “is he or isn’t he?” debate (or at least, that’s up to the reader to decide).

Everyone, gay or non-gay, is looking to escape something, in most cases the social confines of Thebes itself.   Like much of Maguire’s work, the future of these embattled characters is unclear; but there is hope.   For Jeremy, it comes in an opportunity to get discovered while performing at an AIDS charity concert in New York City.

So, my bottom line:   the journeys here are worth following.  Will sexually-loose, ungoverned Tabitha make something of herself?   Will Jeremy transcend heartbreak and musical mediocrity?   And there’s worthwhile wisdom along the way, i.e. if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get, what you’ve always got.

tNQoH gets my full-on recommendation, even if it doesn’t sustain the engrossing quality of Maguire’s re-imagined subjects, my favorites—Wicked, Son of a Witch, and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister.