Gore Vidal's wondrous work of "memoir" of the beautiful and glamorous sex and film terrorist Myra Breckinridge and her attempts to change the face of modern Hollywood... by any means necessary!

A wonderful flying kick at the world of sexual politics! ( )

Just... wow. I hardly know where to start, or really even how to make heads or tails of this book. I am simultaneously fascinated and horrified.

The writing itself is incredibly witty, sharp, and the perfect combination of extremely realistic with little touches of the truly bizarre. I laughed out loud multiple times, often at the strangest and most non-joke-like of jokes.

At the same time, the ostensible protagonist is pretty much repulsive. She is simultaneously misogynist AND misandrist (I suppose that makes her misanthropic, but it's more complicated than that), homophobic AND queer-supremacist, transphobic/gender-essentialist in the most hypocritical way, flat out racist and almost sociopathically manipulative and cruel. I found the rape scene incredibly difficult to finish. It drags on for THIRTY PAGES and that's about thirty pages more rape-glorification than I can handle before I feel the need to go puke all over someone.

And then we come to the abrupt ending, a mere three pages that completely alter the tone of the entire book that precedes them, functioning as a literary slap in the face. Basically, "ha ha, I sucked you deep into this story, and then dropped the ball right on your foot."

I can see how this book would have truly shocked mainstream people in the late 60s, but I'm not sure I can concede the argument that its popularity was some sort of triumph for 'alternative' expressions of sexuality/gender. It pretty firmly shores up all the worst stereotypes about queers, up to and including "transpeople are insane", "bisexuals don't exist (even when they plainly do)" and "sexual abuse makes us gay".

I don't even know what to say. Supposedly this is an incredibly deft critique of all the bigotry Myra embodies, but the problem with that is that Myra is so convincing in her vitriol that fellow bigots could easily take the book as endorsement rather than admonishment. I sort of want to believe that the whole story is an elaborate joke on us, the readers. And obviously Gore Vidal laughed all the way to the bank. Good for him, I suppose.

You've got to love Myra, one of the most fantastic (sic) creations of 20th C literature...Vidal's tongue is not just firmly in his cheek , it is protruding a grotesque distance.....Genius , madness or just delicious fun, you decide ( )

Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal is much better than I expected, though much trashier as well. (I'm going to assume that anyone out there who might want to read the book already knows most of the plot, so spoilers will occur where they will in this review.)

Myra comes to southern California after the death of her husband Myraon who left her a 25% stake in an acting academy run by former cowboy star Buck Loner. She finds the academy dedicated to taking money from young people and keeping them from ever realizing that they have no talent for acting or singing. While he tries to find a way to prevent Myra from getting any of his profitable academy, Buck gives Myra a job teaching empathy and posture. Myra is the only teacher at the academy who tells the students outright what their faults are; they love her for it and flock to her class. She soon falls in with two of them, a couple, Rusty and Mary Anne.

It is Myra's goal in life to completely overpower and debase the male sex, as they once did her husband Myron, who it turns out had an active and adventurous gay sex life. She plots to get Rusty into situations where she can take advantage of him, succeeding twice. While these two scenes are probably the best in the book, they are not for the faint of heart. But if you can be brave, if you can see the book as the spoof it is meant to be, and if you're in the right frame of mind, you....no, you probably won't find them funny, but you will certainly be shocked, even if you know what's coming, as I did. Once Myra has conquered Rusty she moves on to Mary Anne, seducing her as well.

What does it all mean? What was Mr. Vidal up to back in 1968 when he wrote Myra Breckinridge? The book is an all out assault on gender roles, sexuality, sexual orientation, and the Hollywood machine. During the books key scene, also it most controversial, Myra blackmails Rusty into letting her anally rape him with a strap-on dildo, at which point everyone reading the book will have figured out that Myra is really Myron, formerly a homosexual male, now not exactly a lesbian, not exactly a heterosexual woman, but something entirely new. There's enough going on in that one scene to produce many a thesis in gender studies or queer theory. At the end of the book, Myra is found out and struck down by a hit and run driver while attempting to rescue a puppy. After she recovers, she returns to living as a man in heterosexual bliss married to Mary Anne.

I'm having trouble deciding if Myra Breckinridge is more or less of a guilty pleasure than Candide was. The books actually make an interesting pairing, in an unsettling way. Vidal and Voltaire would have made interesting dinner companions in any case. I'm giving Myra Breckinridge four out of five stars, much to my own surprise. There's much more there than meets the eye, but I am a little puzzled that anyone would put it on a list of must read 1001 books which is the challenge I read it for. Must read before you die? I would not go that far. But if you have some time to spare or a flight to take, it will certainly entertain while it passes the time. ( )

While somewhat dated and the shock value that sold the book in the sixties less shocking, Vidal presents a dark, humorous voyage into greed, sexual confusion and old Hollywood, made more colorful by an outrageous cast of characters. Fun read. ( )