If there is another book like this, I haven t found it yet.

A biting satire and a groundbreaking sociologic experiment in fiction, Myra Breckenridge continues to delight the reader forty years since it was published. Not since this book have I ever found a more wonderful novel full of high-class and low-class humor (although Thomas Pynchon has come very close with his sprawling epics, V and Gravity s Rainbow).

Myra Breckenridge begins with Myra writing in her diary at her hotel room. The book s portrait of the late 1960 s is a throw-back for this reader into the extremism of the era. (I think back to Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, and her S.C.U.M. Manifesto when I read this passage):

I am Myra Breckenridge, whom no man shall ever possess. Clad only in a garter belt and one dress shield, I held off the entire elite their finest warriors, my beauty blinding them as it does all men, unmanning them in the way King Kong was reduced to a mere simian whimper by beauteous Fay Wray

Myra has an unstoppable ego, as the above passage shows. She reminds me of feminist critic Camille Paglia. She has a love for old movies, to the point where everyone s actions are represented by scenes from the Golden Age of MGM and Warner Brothers.

Going out to California to settle the details of her husband s will, she meets up with the fat, sleazy head of an acting school, Buck Loner, the uncle of her late husband, Myron Breckenridge. She tells him Myron s mother bequeathed her share of the land the acting school was built on to Myron, and Myron passed the share to her in his will. She has come to collect her rightful share of the money Buck has made from the land, some $500,000. Buck says that he will have his lawyers talk over a settlement. In the meantime, he offers her a job at the school teaching posture and empathy classes, which she accepts.

At the school, Myra quickly becomes frustrated with the male students:

In the forties, American boys created a world empire because they chose to be James Stewart, Clark Gable By imitating godlike autonomous men, our boys were able to defeat Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo. Could we do it again? Are the private eyes and denature cowboys potent enough to serve as imperial exemplars? No. At best, there is James Bond and he invariably ends up tied to a slab of marble with a blowtorch aimed at his crotch.

She doesn t let the girls off any lighter either:

They are an anonymous blur, even to themselves which explains their fitful, mindless shuffling of roles It is easy for these young people to be anything since they are so plainly nothing

Despite her annoyance at the students, she continues to teach at the school. She develops a crush on a student named Rusty. She picks on him often during her posture class because he limps when he walks (the result of an old football accident). She treats him even worse because she cannot possess him, he is dating a girl named Mary-Ann. Myra initially despises Mary-Ann, but later befriends her out of pity and shame.

Every few chapters, a second narrator (Buck) puts in his two cents in the form of a dictation for his secretary to type up. Buck gives us his thoughts on Miss Myra . Few of his thoughts are kind; most of them are thoughts of suspicion and anger. Despite the pain they cause each other, Buck is still attracted to Myra.

The whole novel seems to be based around the sexual, the erotic and (occasionally) the grotesque. Bizarre is only the beginning of the words that could be used to describe this novel. Myra fantasizes; she is the object of fantasy. Students talk of group experiences which combine drugs and sex. One of Myra s friends is a middle-aged talent Agent who beds her clients more often than she helps them. The book is what could be known as a catalogue of perversities that thrived in 1960 s and 1970 s. Myra may obsess with Eros, but this is no less of a book because of it. The bizarre nature of this book makes it even more wonderful to read.

* * *

Gore Vidal, the author of this masterwork, looked back at it with some remorse in his introduction to the new edition of Myra Breckinridge (now available with its sequel, Myron, in one volume). He says that one of the biggest mistakes in his 60+ year writing career was to let MGM turn Myra into a vehicle or, to be precise, a hearse, for Raquel Welsh He laments in his preface:

For the first time in the history of paperback publishing, the film of a book had proved so bad that the sale of the book stopped.

When the book was first published in 1968, there was a huge critical backlash. William F. Buckley Jr. used the book to criticize Vidal during one of their debates about the Democratic and Republican conventions later that year, saying, Why don t we let the author of Myra Breckinridge go back to his pornography and stop letting him make any illusions of Nationalism?

My critical hero, Harold Bloom was the first to really appreciate this book for what it was, writing in the New York Times:

After many readings, Myra Breckinridge continues to give wicked pleasure The polemic of Myra remains the best embodiment of Vidal s most useful insistence as a moralist, which is to say that we ought to cease speaking of homosexuals and heterosexuals. There are only women and men

Bloom saw Vidal s book not as the filth more conservative readers claimed it to be, but as it really is. The book can be read as a philosophic novel (as the work of Ayn Rand or Iris Murdoch are philosophic novels), or a social doctrine in the form of a mystical story. But even more important, it is an entertaining work; a masterpiece of 20^th Century fiction.

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