Word: myra
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...MYRA BRECKINRIDGE by Gore Vidal. 264 pages. Little, Brown...
Nothing in the versatile Vidal's past will quite prepare the reader for Myra Breckinridge. Vidal and his publisher, insisting that the sexual problems of the title character represent a suspense element vital to the novel's enjoyment, coquettishly plead that the book not be reviewed at all. However, anyone who has been to far-off, murky Venice-or just down to the local fag bar-will recognize Myra's true gender long before Vidal coyly pronounces the paradigm. And in all conscience it can be reported that the key to Myra's sexual-identity crisis...
Power Play. Which indeed the plot resembles. Myra is actually a Myron who has had a Christine Jorgensen-type operation and is passing through Hollywood, trying to rape havoc upon unwary heterosexual males. To Myra, sex involves power play, with more power than play; the book's most harrowing scene is Myra's cruel seduction and humiliating buggery, with an artificial penis, of an all-American male...
...themes, and his spoofing of literary forms: the book, he says, is really "a send-up on the nouvelle roman." In that vein, he offers metaphor after metaphor based upon far-out late-show conceits ("I whispered like Phyllis Thaxter in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo"). And he makes it Myra's thesis that the flicks of 1931 to 1945, if not the high point of Western culture, were certainly the most formative influence upon anyone who came of age during that "post-Gutenberg and pre-Apocalypse...
...this time, Ian, a nondescript clerk, had met Myra, 18, a typist who soon began moonlighting for Ian as a sadist's apprentice. When their parlor perversities and homemade dirty photographs began to pall, there was very little left to do but to test De Sade's theory: "Murder is a hobby and a supreme pleasure." A young corpse a year, with frequent visits to the graves on the moors, kept Ian and Myra reasonably serene but leaves Williams feverishly laying out plot and explication like a row of tombstones.* He points, he nudges, he oohs...