Myra Breckinridge

within just a few pages, i could see why this is considered Important Literature. it’s a game-changer, irreverent, and very bold. but it’s not only bold, it engages on several levels, at times very funny, satirical, intellectual, pornographic, horrific, political, frank, and prescient.

Vidal always shows and doesn’t tell and never overdoing it with exposition. we are given insight into thought processes and points of view that we have to put together while being entertained with interesting characters and, -to put it mildly- provocative ideas. Vidal doesn’t pull any punches in this one.

ultimately, i think the book is transformative and reading it without having known what it’s about would have been absolutely shocking at the show more time of its publication-and mind-blowing now for many.

don’t let the length of this review fool you. i loved this book. show less

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 show more 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. show less

Myra Breckinridge narrates the story of her schemes to obtain her rightful inheritance, through her late husband Myron's claim, and in the process leave her mark on the dream machine of Hollywood. Working in the deplorable "Uncle" Buck's school for would-be stars, she teaches Empathy and Posture while belittling and mocking her aspirant pupils. This novel takes the form of a series of essays and meditations (confessionals might be a better term) on her activities and the wider world of 1960s American sexual politics. The tone is light and scintillating, but the ethics are dubious. Myra has the vitality and the vivacity of a youthful prodigal, but her project to gain power and mastery over those around her makes her very difficult to show more respect in a sustained and serious way. The sordid escapades have some lurid entertainment value and they do strike some targets worthy of mockery; but, the overall effect is a little too close at times to the throwaway slapstick of the Blake Edwards/Woody Allen comedies of the 60s with which the story is contemporaneous. It is very much a product of its time - witness these comments towards the end which sum up the mixture of Myra's polymorphous perversity and the 1960s West Coast weltanschauung:

"... I have decided to make an investigation in depth of the problem of communication in the post-McLuhan world. Each day that I spend in the company of the students makes me more than ever aware that a new world is being born without a single reliable witness except me. I alone have the intuition as well as the profound grasp of philosophy and psychology to trace for man not only what he is but what he must become, once he has ceased to be confined to a single sexual role, to a single person ... once he has become free to blend with others, to exchange personalities with both men and women, to play out the most elaborate of dreams in a world where there will soon be no limits of the human spirit's play."

If the human spirit is nothing more than the play of bodies then Myra has something to say; if Gore Vidal is satirising this rhetoric then the book has some interesting and arresting ideas going on. But, ultimately, Vidal does not come across as strong a satirist or a moralist as another late 60s veteran, Kurt Vonnegut whose wit and lightness of touch seems in all cases more assured and more biting. show less

I don’t get the negative reviews of this book.

This book is
1. Thought provoking
2. Challenging
3. Hilarious at times
4. moving and sad at other times

I don’t agree that it’s aged—only if you are a dogmatic, inflexible, moralist will you find this book offensive or old hat. It’s satirizes us humans and our pretentious beliefs and desires. It’s certainly not transphobic, homophobic or misogynistic. Please don’t confuse the character in the book with the book itself or the author’s ideas, although it is not unlikely that like M he thought the human race better off extinct.

As for the intensely disturbing rape scene, it is magnificently written. Unless you have a heart of stone, reading it you feel and understand exactly why rape show more is such an awful, inexcusable act. It also gets to the very heart of the destructive link between the abuse of power and instrumentalized sex. If we are supposedly in the age of metoo, that scene alone makes this book still topical and relevant, particularly since it happens in Hollywood.

Read it with an open mind and heart and you are sure to get much out of reading this book. Four stars because the writing is choppy at times. Really it’s 4.5 show less

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 show more 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. show less

Reason read: 2026, March botm. I voted for this and read it but it is definitely not my book. This was written in 1968 and I think it was included in the 1001 books because it is a "camp" book and not in a nice way. This book is satire of Hollywood but it also a book about gender and transgender. The novel focuses on the movies of the forties most of which I am not familiar with. It is also about sex used as power over another. There is a rape scene in this book that I hated. This is a book that strengthens rather than decreases my thoughts on gender fluidity and confusion. I don't think I've ever read anything by Vidal before. He is known to criticize social and sexual norms. He called himself bisexual but lived with his male partner show more for 53 years. Vidal rejected gender identity labels. He believed everyone was bisexual. Another book that supports the idea that there is nothing new under the sun.

Quotes:
First line: "I am Myra Breckinridge who no man will ever possess.

"They are quite relaxed about sex; not only do they have affairs with one another, they also attend orgies in a most matter-of-fact way, so unlike my generation.... Yet despite all this athleticism, their true interests seem to be, in some odd way, outside sex. They like to sit for long periods doing nothing at all, just listening to music or to what they regard as music. They are essentially passive; hence the popularity of pot."

"As I have been a goddess, so others can be whatever they want in this vast theatre we call the world where all bodies and all minds will one day be at the disposal of everyone, and no one will read books for that is a solitary activity like going to the bathroom alone (it is the proliferation of private bathrooms which has more than anything else, created modern man's sense of alienation from others of his kind: ...."

"...the Good drive cars that fill the air with the foul odor of burning fossils, and so day by day our lungs fill up with the stuff of great ferns and dinosaurs who thus revenge themselves upon their successors, causing US to wither and die prematurely, as did they."

The movie, I hear, is not worth writing. It is a 1970 movie that starred Rachel Welch as Myra and Mae West as Leticia. Mary-Ann was played by Farrah Fawcett and Rusty as Tom Sellick. I can actually see these people playing these characters. I is considered a "camp" film. It is so bad it has been called the worst film ever. show less

This novel is Vidal the Gadfly at his most outrageous, and thus, vastly entertaining. I don't think he did any better than this book, before or since. At the time it was a breathtaking exploration of sexual identity, and does seem a pioneer in popularly entertainments on this theme. It is well written and I hope it was very profitable to the writer.