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Myra Breckinridge
Determined to reinvent himself and explore new territory in his work, Gore Vidal published a provocative satirical work destined to be on a collision course with social conventions in 1968. Written as a diary, Myra Breckinridge, someone determined not to be possessed by any man, recounts her day as she lives it out in the Hollywood of the '60s. Feminism, transsexuality, and a host of cinematic jokes abound.
264 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1968
About the author
Gore Vidal
291 books1,743 followersWorks of American writer Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, noted for his cynical humor and his numerous accounts of society in decline, include the play
The Best Man
(1960) and the novel
Myra Breckinridge
(1968) .
People know his essays, screenplays, and Broadway.
They also knew his patrician manner, transatlantic accent, and witty aphorisms. Vidal came from a distinguished political lineage; his grandfather was the senator Thomas Gore, and he later became a relation (through marriage) to Jacqueline Kennedy.
Vidal, a longtime political critic, ran twice for political office. He was a lifelong isolationist Democrat. The Nation, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Review of Books, and Esquire published his essays.
Essays and media appearances long criticized foreign policy. In addition, he from the 1980s onwards characterized the United States as a decaying empire. Additionally, he was known for his well publicized spats with such figures as Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Truman Capote.
They fell into distinct social and historical camps. Alongside his social, his best known historical include Julian, Burr, and Lincoln. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), outraged conservative critics as the first major feature of unambiguous homosexuality.
At the time of his death he was the last of a generation of American writers who had served during World War II, including J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller. Perhaps best remembered for his caustic wit, he referred to himself as a "gentleman bitch" and has been described as the 20th century's answer to Oscar Wilde
Also used the pseudonym Edgar Box.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
Gore Vidal é um dos nomes centrais na história da literatura americana pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial.
Nascido em 1925, em Nova Iorque, estudou na Academia de Phillips Exeter (Estado de New Hampshire). O seu primeiro romance, Williwaw (1946), era uma história da guerra claramente influenciada pelo estilo de Hemingway. Embora grande parte da sua obra tenha a ver com o século XX americano, Vidal debruçou-se várias vezes sobre épocas recuadas, como, por exemplo, em A Search for the King (1950), Juliano (1964) e Creation (1981).
Entre os seus temas de eleição está o mundo do cinema e, mais concretamente, os bastidores de Hollywood, que ele desmonta de forma satírica e implacável em títulos como Myra Breckinridge (1968), Myron (1975) e Duluth (1983).
Senhor de um estilo exuberante, multifacetado e sempre surpreendente, publicou, em 1995, a autobiografia Palimpsest: A Memoir. As obras 'O Instituto Smithsonian' e 'A Idade do Ouro' encontram-se traduzidas em português.
Neto do senador Thomas Gore, enteado do padrasto de Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, primo distante de Al Gore, Gore Vidal sempre se revelou um espelho crítico das grandezas e misérias dos EUA.
Faleceu a 31 de julho de 2012, aos 86 anos, na sua casa em Hollywood, vítima de pneumonia.
People know his essays, screenplays, and Broadway.
They also knew his patrician manner, transatlantic accent, and witty aphorisms. Vidal came from a distinguished political lineage; his grandfather was the senator Thomas Gore, and he later became a relation (through marriage) to Jacqueline Kennedy.
Vidal, a longtime political critic, ran twice for political office. He was a lifelong isolationist Democrat. The Nation, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Review of Books, and Esquire published his essays.
Essays and media appearances long criticized foreign policy. In addition, he from the 1980s onwards characterized the United States as a decaying empire. Additionally, he was known for his well publicized spats with such figures as Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Truman Capote.
They fell into distinct social and historical camps. Alongside his social, his best known historical include Julian, Burr, and Lincoln. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), outraged conservative critics as the first major feature of unambiguous homosexuality.
At the time of his death he was the last of a generation of American writers who had served during World War II, including J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller. Perhaps best remembered for his caustic wit, he referred to himself as a "gentleman bitch" and has been described as the 20th century's answer to Oscar Wilde
Also used the pseudonym Edgar Box.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
Gore Vidal é um dos nomes centrais na história da literatura americana pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial.
Nascido em 1925, em Nova Iorque, estudou na Academia de Phillips Exeter (Estado de New Hampshire). O seu primeiro romance, Williwaw (1946), era uma história da guerra claramente influenciada pelo estilo de Hemingway. Embora grande parte da sua obra tenha a ver com o século XX americano, Vidal debruçou-se várias vezes sobre épocas recuadas, como, por exemplo, em A Search for the King (1950), Juliano (1964) e Creation (1981).
Entre os seus temas de eleição está o mundo do cinema e, mais concretamente, os bastidores de Hollywood, que ele desmonta de forma satírica e implacável em títulos como Myra Breckinridge (1968), Myron (1975) e Duluth (1983).
Senhor de um estilo exuberante, multifacetado e sempre surpreendente, publicou, em 1995, a autobiografia Palimpsest: A Memoir. As obras 'O Instituto Smithsonian' e 'A Idade do Ouro' encontram-se traduzidas em português.
Neto do senador Thomas Gore, enteado do padrasto de Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, primo distante de Al Gore, Gore Vidal sempre se revelou um espelho crítico das grandezas e misérias dos EUA.
Faleceu a 31 de julho de 2012, aos 86 anos, na sua casa em Hollywood, vítima de pneumonia.
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December 23, 2020
HOLLYWOOD QUEEN
Raquel Welch in tutto il suo splendore.
Che il grande paese, il Nuovo Mondo, avesse perso la sua innocenza, nel 1968, il fatidico anno in cui uscì questo romanzo, era un fatto già emerso, anche noto: ma che l’eroe a stelle e strisce potesse incarnarsi in un transessuale!
Il celebre capitolo 29.
Gore Vidal si chiamava in effetti Gore di cognome, una famiglia della buonissima società, imparentata coi Kennedy, fedeli al partito democratico fino al midollo. Omosessuale precursore di qualsiasi outing, ha vissuto a lungo in Italia, molto a Ravello (il recente biopic di Netflix è saltato per le note vicende legate al suo protagonista Kevin Spacey), ma all’epoca di questo romanzo scandalo abitava a Roma, in un superattico di Largo di Torre Argentina, insieme al compagno Howard.
Era il giugno del 1968: gli ci volle un solo mese per scrivere questo romanzo, il suo migliore, il suo più celebre, che cinquanta anni dopo ancora grida urla scalpita e strepita contro i benpensanti, diverte, illumina, fa ridere, è uno spasso.
Raquel Welch qui con Roger Herren che impersona Rusty: fu l’inizio e la fine della sua brevissima carriera.
La trama è tutto meno che semplice da riassumere, ha svolte e giravolte. Mi appoggio alla corrispondente pagina Wikipedia per una sintesi molto sintetica:
Il libro racconta la vicenda di Myron Breckinridge il quale, dopo un'operazione di cambiamento di sesso, diventa l'affascinante Myra. Giunto a Hollywood si presenta alla scuola di recitazione di suo zio, fingendosi la vedova di sé stesso, per ottenere in tal modo l'eredità che gli spetta. Il suo obiettivo, giunto nella "capitale" del cinema, è quello di distruggere il mito del "maschio americano".
Il progetto di Myron->Myra->Myron come enunciato dallo stesso Vidal era:
la distruzione delle ultime tracce residue nella razza della virilità tradizionale allo scopo di riallineare i sessi, riducendo così la popolazione mentre si aumenta la felicità umana e si prepara l'umanità per il suo stadio successivo.
Nel cast del film anche John Huston, primo a sinistra, e Mae West, al centro della foto.
Un uomo che diventa una donna che nessun uomo possederà mai, che dopo essere ritornato uomo, asessuato e felice, sposa una donna solo etero.
Nella scuola di recitazione, Myra diventa insegnante di Portamento ed Empatia (!!), finendo per irretire sia un giovane aitante aspirante attore, Rusty, sia la di lui dolce fidanzata.
Vidal era già noto per la sua lingua tagliente stizzoso provocatoria (che non lo faceva amare da quell’altra lingua tagliente stizzosa e provocatoria di Truman Capote): il suo romanzo “La statua di sale” aveva già affrontato allegramente l’omosessualità maschile.
Qui però va oltre: le descrizioni sono meticolosamente anatomicamente pornografiche (il capitolo 29 su tutti), la sessualità bivalente del/della protagonista mortifica il culto della mascolinità, che si sa in US è roba seria, soprattutto a quell’epoca, presenta il sesso come l’espressione più palese del potere, si diverte a invertire i ruoli con la donna dominatrice che odia i maschi e la società maschilista, gli uomini non li caccia, li annienta, autentica femme fatale. Solo che non è una donna, è un lui che diventa lei e poi ritorna lui (operazioni a Copenhagen).
È un pastiche, una parodia, un romanzo pop, camp, comico, che fu attaccato dalla critica puritana (credo che Vidal subì anche un processo), ma vendette subito tre milioni di copie, e dopo aver fatto ricco il suo autore, che era già ricco, portandogli in tasca novecentomila dollari dell’epoca in diritti cinema, divenne un film mitico perché Raquel Welch impersonava Myra in bikini a stelle e strisce, cappello da cowboy e stivali bianchi, e perché quasi subito entrò nella lista dei peggiori 50 film di tutti i tempi.
In Australia non vollero pubblicarlo, in Inghilterra lo fecero ma in una versione edulcorata, che purtroppo è la stessa tradotta in italiano da Bompiani (per esempio, “cock” diventa “membro virile”, “self abuse” diventa “ooohhh”.
Ma ora credo che l’editore Fazi abbia rimesso le cose a posto pubblicando una traduzione dal vero originale.
PS
Nel 1975 Gore Vidal scrisse un seguito intitolato “Myron” e sostituì le parolacce con il nome dei giudici della Corte Suprema
Raquel Welch in tutto il suo splendore.
Che il grande paese, il Nuovo Mondo, avesse perso la sua innocenza, nel 1968, il fatidico anno in cui uscì questo romanzo, era un fatto già emerso, anche noto: ma che l’eroe a stelle e strisce potesse incarnarsi in un transessuale!
Il celebre capitolo 29.
Gore Vidal si chiamava in effetti Gore di cognome, una famiglia della buonissima società, imparentata coi Kennedy, fedeli al partito democratico fino al midollo. Omosessuale precursore di qualsiasi outing, ha vissuto a lungo in Italia, molto a Ravello (il recente biopic di Netflix è saltato per le note vicende legate al suo protagonista Kevin Spacey), ma all’epoca di questo romanzo scandalo abitava a Roma, in un superattico di Largo di Torre Argentina, insieme al compagno Howard.
Era il giugno del 1968: gli ci volle un solo mese per scrivere questo romanzo, il suo migliore, il suo più celebre, che cinquanta anni dopo ancora grida urla scalpita e strepita contro i benpensanti, diverte, illumina, fa ridere, è uno spasso.
Raquel Welch qui con Roger Herren che impersona Rusty: fu l’inizio e la fine della sua brevissima carriera.
La trama è tutto meno che semplice da riassumere, ha svolte e giravolte. Mi appoggio alla corrispondente pagina Wikipedia per una sintesi molto sintetica:
Il libro racconta la vicenda di Myron Breckinridge il quale, dopo un'operazione di cambiamento di sesso, diventa l'affascinante Myra. Giunto a Hollywood si presenta alla scuola di recitazione di suo zio, fingendosi la vedova di sé stesso, per ottenere in tal modo l'eredità che gli spetta. Il suo obiettivo, giunto nella "capitale" del cinema, è quello di distruggere il mito del "maschio americano".
Il progetto di Myron->Myra->Myron come enunciato dallo stesso Vidal era:
la distruzione delle ultime tracce residue nella razza della virilità tradizionale allo scopo di riallineare i sessi, riducendo così la popolazione mentre si aumenta la felicità umana e si prepara l'umanità per il suo stadio successivo.
Nel cast del film anche John Huston, primo a sinistra, e Mae West, al centro della foto.
Un uomo che diventa una donna che nessun uomo possederà mai, che dopo essere ritornato uomo, asessuato e felice, sposa una donna solo etero.
Nella scuola di recitazione, Myra diventa insegnante di Portamento ed Empatia (!!), finendo per irretire sia un giovane aitante aspirante attore, Rusty, sia la di lui dolce fidanzata.
Vidal era già noto per la sua lingua tagliente stizzoso provocatoria (che non lo faceva amare da quell’altra lingua tagliente stizzosa e provocatoria di Truman Capote): il suo romanzo “La statua di sale” aveva già affrontato allegramente l’omosessualità maschile.
Qui però va oltre: le descrizioni sono meticolosamente anatomicamente pornografiche (il capitolo 29 su tutti), la sessualità bivalente del/della protagonista mortifica il culto della mascolinità, che si sa in US è roba seria, soprattutto a quell’epoca, presenta il sesso come l’espressione più palese del potere, si diverte a invertire i ruoli con la donna dominatrice che odia i maschi e la società maschilista, gli uomini non li caccia, li annienta, autentica femme fatale. Solo che non è una donna, è un lui che diventa lei e poi ritorna lui (operazioni a Copenhagen).
È un pastiche, una parodia, un romanzo pop, camp, comico, che fu attaccato dalla critica puritana (credo che Vidal subì anche un processo), ma vendette subito tre milioni di copie, e dopo aver fatto ricco il suo autore, che era già ricco, portandogli in tasca novecentomila dollari dell’epoca in diritti cinema, divenne un film mitico perché Raquel Welch impersonava Myra in bikini a stelle e strisce, cappello da cowboy e stivali bianchi, e perché quasi subito entrò nella lista dei peggiori 50 film di tutti i tempi.
In Australia non vollero pubblicarlo, in Inghilterra lo fecero ma in una versione edulcorata, che purtroppo è la stessa tradotta in italiano da Bompiani (per esempio, “cock” diventa “membro virile”, “self abuse” diventa “ooohhh”.
Ma ora credo che l’editore Fazi abbia rimesso le cose a posto pubblicando una traduzione dal vero originale.
PS
Nel 1975 Gore Vidal scrisse un seguito intitolato “Myron” e sostituì le parolacce con il nome dei giudici della Corte Suprema
December 27, 2012
I'm a bit baffled by all the people who are offended by the retrograde gender politics of this book. Is it transphobic? Sure, at times. It's also (at times) equally misogynistic as it is man-hating, homophobic as it is radically queer, elitist as it is populist, anti-hippie as it is anti-East Coast elite. The contradictions and topics to take offense at are limitless. This is a true satire, lashing out at all who stand in Myra's path (including Myra herself). Everyone and everything is so completely over-the-top and preposterous in this universe, and the plot is so patently ridiculous, I can't imagine you would ever take any of it seriously.
Anyway. I know it's very non-postmodern and anti-New Criticism of me to ask you to consider a book's context when reading it, but I think that's essential here. Yes, to our modern sensibilities, this book is quite clunky, reading like if J.K. Rowling tried her hand at ghostwriting a Chuck Palahniuk novel. But think of 1968, when this was a bona fide bestseller (back when that meant something about the culture at large), mentioned in the same breath as Updike's Couples and Portnoy's Complaint -- two genuinely misogynistic, unequivocally homophobic, and very very very serious works of art forced into dialogue with this completely inappropriate, absurdly fluffy yet penetratingly belligerent sexual romp.
Anyway. I know it's very non-postmodern and anti-New Criticism of me to ask you to consider a book's context when reading it, but I think that's essential here. Yes, to our modern sensibilities, this book is quite clunky, reading like if J.K. Rowling tried her hand at ghostwriting a Chuck Palahniuk novel. But think of 1968, when this was a bona fide bestseller (back when that meant something about the culture at large), mentioned in the same breath as Updike's Couples and Portnoy's Complaint -- two genuinely misogynistic, unequivocally homophobic, and very very very serious works of art forced into dialogue with this completely inappropriate, absurdly fluffy yet penetratingly belligerent sexual romp.
September 22, 2023
My mission: the destruction of the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood in the race in order to realign the sexes, thus reducing population while increasing human happiness and preparing for its next stage
What the what? What was that again, Myra? What next stage?
There is only the logic of a madperson in this novel: a gay author* writes a novel about a gay man who becomes a transsexual woman and who then rapes a straight man (she is the new American woman who uses men the way they once used women) which has the effect of filling, as it were, the straight man with rage so that he transforms from a gentle sex partner into a man who inflicts terrible violence on his current girlfriend, much to her great joy, as she loves the kind of rough sex that puts her in hospital. The modern reader’s head might be exploding at this point.
There is a swingers party featuring members of a band called The Four Skins (of which there are five members, and sometimes that’s the level of humour here).**
This outrageous for 1968 and even more outrageous for 2023 novel is strewn with what-did-she-just-say run-that-by-me-again moments*** as Myra flings theories, dreams, schemes, insults****, denunciations and diatribes to the right and to the left, usually invoking references to 1940s movies and unremembered stars, as she rampages her way through the farcical mostly cringe-making plot.
As well as being grotesquely offensive, Gore Vidal is very funny. There’s a character called Uncle Buck who dictates various memos-to-self throughout, and he is hilarious. Would have loved more of him.
Now can I in all conscience recommend this rancid, dyspeptic, sly, lofty, over-educated, phallocentric satiroparodic jeux d’esprit?
I have to say : approach with extreme caution.
NOTES
1) SOMETHING I LEARNED
Until the Forties, only the upper or educated classes were circumcised in America. The real people were spared this humiliation. But during the affluent postwar years the operation became standard procedure, making money for doctors as well as allowing the American mother to mutilate her son in order that he might never forget her early power over him.
2) TWO LITERARY PREDECESSORS
Orlando (1928) – Virginia Woolf’s transgender classic; GV naturally loved Orlando but one can only imagine with a shudder what Mrs Woolf would have said about Myra Breckinridge.
Lolita (1955) – another surprise hit novel about sex written by a highbrow about which I wonder if most of the millions of copies sold were abandoned halfway. I mean, was this really what the eager purchasers of Myra Breckinridge were after? - He promptly took me in goatish arms, rammed his soft acorn against my pudendum, and bit my ear.
*****
*GV would have complained (imperiously, majestically) about this; he rejected the notion that there was such a thing as a gay person – he thought that there were only gay acts.
**I wonder if GV noted the arrival of English punk band The 4-Skins in 1982; and likewise wonder if the 4-skins ever read Myra Breckinridge
***Such as her observation that young men in the 1960s are quite totalitarian-minded, even for Americans, and I am convinced that any attractive television personality who wanted to become our dictator would have their full support. !!! Or how about : in every American there is a Boston Strangler longing to break a neck during orgasm. Ours is a violent race.
****Not even I can create a fictional character as one-dimensional as the average reader
What the what? What was that again, Myra? What next stage?
There is only the logic of a madperson in this novel: a gay author* writes a novel about a gay man who becomes a transsexual woman and who then rapes a straight man (she is the new American woman who uses men the way they once used women) which has the effect of filling, as it were, the straight man with rage so that he transforms from a gentle sex partner into a man who inflicts terrible violence on his current girlfriend, much to her great joy, as she loves the kind of rough sex that puts her in hospital. The modern reader’s head might be exploding at this point.
There is a swingers party featuring members of a band called The Four Skins (of which there are five members, and sometimes that’s the level of humour here).**
This outrageous for 1968 and even more outrageous for 2023 novel is strewn with what-did-she-just-say run-that-by-me-again moments*** as Myra flings theories, dreams, schemes, insults****, denunciations and diatribes to the right and to the left, usually invoking references to 1940s movies and unremembered stars, as she rampages her way through the farcical mostly cringe-making plot.
As well as being grotesquely offensive, Gore Vidal is very funny. There’s a character called Uncle Buck who dictates various memos-to-self throughout, and he is hilarious. Would have loved more of him.
Now can I in all conscience recommend this rancid, dyspeptic, sly, lofty, over-educated, phallocentric satiroparodic jeux d’esprit?
I have to say : approach with extreme caution.
NOTES
1) SOMETHING I LEARNED
Until the Forties, only the upper or educated classes were circumcised in America. The real people were spared this humiliation. But during the affluent postwar years the operation became standard procedure, making money for doctors as well as allowing the American mother to mutilate her son in order that he might never forget her early power over him.
2) TWO LITERARY PREDECESSORS
Orlando (1928) – Virginia Woolf’s transgender classic; GV naturally loved Orlando but one can only imagine with a shudder what Mrs Woolf would have said about Myra Breckinridge.
Lolita (1955) – another surprise hit novel about sex written by a highbrow about which I wonder if most of the millions of copies sold were abandoned halfway. I mean, was this really what the eager purchasers of Myra Breckinridge were after? - He promptly took me in goatish arms, rammed his soft acorn against my pudendum, and bit my ear.
*****
*GV would have complained (imperiously, majestically) about this; he rejected the notion that there was such a thing as a gay person – he thought that there were only gay acts.
**I wonder if GV noted the arrival of English punk band The 4-Skins in 1982; and likewise wonder if the 4-skins ever read Myra Breckinridge
***Such as her observation that young men in the 1960s are quite totalitarian-minded, even for Americans, and I am convinced that any attractive television personality who wanted to become our dictator would have their full support. !!! Or how about : in every American there is a Boston Strangler longing to break a neck during orgasm. Ours is a violent race.
****Not even I can create a fictional character as one-dimensional as the average reader
August 17, 2023
Few characters have left me as conflicted as Myra Breckinridge. I love her, I hate her. She charms me yet disgusts me. Her lot is not an easy one, and her ideas aren't unsound, but her execution is a little too American Horror Story-esque for my taste and, like the disappointing final chapter, leaves much to be desired. I am on board with our narrator as she wonders what this or that character is packing, but mere musing is not enough for her. Things take a turn from which there is no U-turning, and the book just doesn't read the same after that, even if she once more has my sympathy near the end. Somehow.
Her sincere reverence for Hollywood is nothing if not touching, perhaps because of my own interest in the subject, but I could see this quickly becoming tedious. I have seen Bette Davis in The Catered Affair (for which, it turns out, Vidal wrote the screenplay) and so patted myself on the back--only a thousand other references to go.
Sex and gender are book's main preoccupations but there is also some rumination on generational divisions which reminded me of A Single Man--Myra is an acting teacher rather than an English professor named George, yet like him lusts after one of her students. But George is just a tame and heartbroken Englishman, and Myra--well...I adore her--despise her--admire her--detest her. It is a book full of -isms, having been published in 1968, and can still spark both a riot and a conversation across the ideological spectrum.
Know any other works of fiction with a chapter on cirumcision (the most benign of the book's subjects)? I always had an idea of Vidal as a rather Literary writer of historical epics (which he was, later in life) but turns out his career is checkered with absurdist comic works. As polarizing a figure as his most famous creation.
Her sincere reverence for Hollywood is nothing if not touching, perhaps because of my own interest in the subject, but I could see this quickly becoming tedious. I have seen Bette Davis in The Catered Affair (for which, it turns out, Vidal wrote the screenplay) and so patted myself on the back--only a thousand other references to go.
Sex and gender are book's main preoccupations but there is also some rumination on generational divisions which reminded me of A Single Man--Myra is an acting teacher rather than an English professor named George, yet like him lusts after one of her students. But George is just a tame and heartbroken Englishman, and Myra--well...I adore her--despise her--admire her--detest her. It is a book full of -isms, having been published in 1968, and can still spark both a riot and a conversation across the ideological spectrum.
Know any other works of fiction with a chapter on cirumcision (the most benign of the book's subjects)? I always had an idea of Vidal as a rather Literary writer of historical epics (which he was, later in life) but turns out his career is checkered with absurdist comic works. As polarizing a figure as his most famous creation.
August 27, 2012
Transphobic, misogynistic, anti-semitic, smug. The transsexual woman as insane, murderous rapist is a fairly tiresome & offensive storyline - especially when the ending involves Myra "recovering" from her insanity to return to life as Myron. Despite Gore Vidal's obvious pleasure with himself as some kind of subversive, the majority of the characters and storylines are actually fairly shallow & undeveloped. It appears that the success of the book relies on the reader responding with shock & disgust at the acts described - rather it was the Vidal's glee with his own cleverness & deviance that left me nauseous. Perhaps the graphic sex and depictions of "sexually deviant" behaviour & non-normative gender expression were unusual at the time of publication & might still challege some readers. But depth and insight there is none. Dennis Altman has clearly never actually read any queer theory.
Worth noting, the anti-semitic rants littered through the book are far too close to things Vidal actually said to truly pass as fiction.
Worth noting, the anti-semitic rants littered through the book are far too close to things Vidal actually said to truly pass as fiction.
November 25, 2015
A short, depraved, outrageous farce that amuses and bemuses. Both funny and unsettling. Comedy and tragedy collide.
Gore Vidal manages to pour scorn on everyone and everything, especially the culture of late 1960's Southern California and everything that went into making it what it was. The central character, Myra, is a seductive anti-heroine whom we may simultaneously root for and despise. The farce is apparent early when we see Myra as alternately a mouthpiece for Vidal and an object for his scorn... the mask is never rendered fully lifelike, as one must surely wonder how a 27 year old can sound so middle aged at times, a "spiritual child of the forties," looking in contempt and pity at the youth of today: "It is so easy for these young people to be anything since they are so plainly nothing, and know it."
There is a wealth of wit in the text, and many ideas on the nature of society, gender, the fate of man, power, intelligence, etcetera. The majority of these ideas are presented in such an overblown, excessive manner, and held at times to be plainly ridiculous, but it also seems apparent that there is genuine bitterness being expressed at the heart of the cynically humorous horror-show.
Vidal, through Myra, enacts some terribly sadistic, psychically harmful sex fantasies and has a laugh with it all. But it is also made clear that the author and protagonist are aware of the injustice and terrible consequences of these acts. A fantasy, fully realized, can be transforming and traumatic.
In the midst of this there are some golden innocents, archetypal, who are the suffering playthings that we may reasonably see as representative of the old American ideals being ravished and metamorphosed.
While the buildup to the denouement is full of many forms of tension, including the tension between what is strictly for entertainment purposes and what is sincerely expressive, the conclusion reasserts the farcical nature of the work. But this is not entirely reassuring. We've been through a lot in these few pages, and the tension lingers, as do the doubts and fears for the youth, the culture, and the future... and for Myra!
Gore Vidal manages to pour scorn on everyone and everything, especially the culture of late 1960's Southern California and everything that went into making it what it was. The central character, Myra, is a seductive anti-heroine whom we may simultaneously root for and despise. The farce is apparent early when we see Myra as alternately a mouthpiece for Vidal and an object for his scorn... the mask is never rendered fully lifelike, as one must surely wonder how a 27 year old can sound so middle aged at times, a "spiritual child of the forties," looking in contempt and pity at the youth of today: "It is so easy for these young people to be anything since they are so plainly nothing, and know it."
There is a wealth of wit in the text, and many ideas on the nature of society, gender, the fate of man, power, intelligence, etcetera. The majority of these ideas are presented in such an overblown, excessive manner, and held at times to be plainly ridiculous, but it also seems apparent that there is genuine bitterness being expressed at the heart of the cynically humorous horror-show.
Vidal, through Myra, enacts some terribly sadistic, psychically harmful sex fantasies and has a laugh with it all. But it is also made clear that the author and protagonist are aware of the injustice and terrible consequences of these acts. A fantasy, fully realized, can be transforming and traumatic.
In the midst of this there are some golden innocents, archetypal, who are the suffering playthings that we may reasonably see as representative of the old American ideals being ravished and metamorphosed.
While the buildup to the denouement is full of many forms of tension, including the tension between what is strictly for entertainment purposes and what is sincerely expressive, the conclusion reasserts the farcical nature of the work. But this is not entirely reassuring. We've been through a lot in these few pages, and the tension lingers, as do the doubts and fears for the youth, the culture, and the future... and for Myra!
Read
March 1, 2020If I was going to read one Gore Vidal book (why), I'd decided, it was going to be The City and the Pillar. It's a landmark in English-language, certainly American, gay fiction, it's short - and, whilst a novel from 1948 was likely to contain a few things unacceptable in the 2010s, it wouldn't be the minefield that is Myra Breckinridge.
I'd also kind-of conflated the notoriously bad film of Myra with the novel. But a longtime GR friend, who's read a lot more Vidal than most people, when I asked him which book to go for, recommended Myra Breckinridge. I assumed at first that he was taking the piss. But I'd noticed it was on the 1001. Then I looked through Harold Bloom's Western Canon list again and it was even on there? WTF? There is a lot of dull-looking 20th-century US fiction on Bloom's lists that I've never heard anyone else talk about anywhere (and for which his predictions of classic status are assuredly not coming true so far), but Myra Breckinridge is absolutely not what you'd think that old grump would have approved of. I was intrigued, and in the end my apprehension was beaten because I couldn't resist the opportunity to tick off another book on so many lists at once via such a short novel. (I still want to read The City and the Pillar, but there's a lot of other stuff that's higher priority for the moment.)
I'd long been aware that Myra Breckinridge, the novel, had been written to deliberately provoke readers of the late 1960s - and I figured from recent reviews that, fifty years later, it had become offensive in further ways, originally unintended, because of shifting values and especially the expectation of realistic and positive representations of trans people in fiction. But, both before and after reading, it also seemed to sit in a tradition of transgressive humour, much of it witty, but some more shock and offence-based such as is used by some drag queens in comedy - see for example this (negative) Guardian review of Bianca del Rio.
This year, I've edited some queer-theory academic papers, and that work indicated that in academia, there remains a sense of complexity and resistance to rigid categorisations, queerness as one could be confident of its meaning being understood on here a few years ago - beyond certain strict approaches now widely known from pop-culture and social media based activism. (i.e. approaches which exist as a front in a war for access to services, or legal recognition. For example in idea-space or art there may be fluidity in gender identification after a social, legal or surgical transition, but fictional characters like this may be very unhelpful if viewed as part of a culture-wide argument for government health services, and as such they are strongly discouraged by social media - even though, as queer theory can indicate, on a deeper level, further change isn't inherently wrong in any way, and also fits with the acceptance of non-binary, genderqueer, genderfluid and similar identities.) This, along with the late 1960s-early 1970s context of transgressive literary fiction and intellectual counterculture (e.g. J.G. Ballard's Crash) and elements of Gore Vidal's biography, informed my understanding of Myra Breckinridge.
The early part of the novel has one of those deliciously camp, waspish outrageous sort of voices which I first came to love as an Oscar Wilde-obsessed teenager in the 1990s. (There may not be a totally acceptable way to phrase this now, as it's a less acceptable sentiment.) It has that fascinating obliqueness - the hearing and interpretation even prompts a sort of mental proprioception - whereby one can never be entirely sure what is and is not serious, unless you know the person well … and even then, sometimes …
Such ambiguity does not work well in the age of Twitterstorms. It was a voice that once seemed to be associated with transwomen as well as with camp gay men and drag - on a general cultural level there didn't used to seem so much delineation between these identities. It would now be said that's because (other than Jan Morris) there was little representation of transwomen on their own terms, especially those who led 'ordinary' lives outside the entertainment sphere. Also due to lack of service provision: Quentin Crisp (b. 1908) said in the 1970s that had sex-change surgery been readily available when he was young, he would have gone for it. (It was done on a small scale in Weimar Germany, but not really accessible to a young British person.) And that cultural conflation was also a relic of legal repression, which in Britain and the US affected men who had sex with men or who were liable to the assumption that they did (but which was not as severe on lesbians). However, now, Myra Breckinridge is defined as a novel about a transwoman by a predominantly gay bisexual man, who presented in public as cis. (I don't know what, if anything, Vidal said about his own sense of gender identity - and in any case, such reflection would have been shaped by the categories and their boundaries as they were when he was forming his identity, and less by the rapid change in this area in the 2010s. He died in 2012.)
Alongside its affinity with old-school underground camp, the first page of Myra Breckinridge loudly proclaims colonialism:
Clad only in garter belt and one dress shield, I held off the entire elite of the Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for "why" or "because." Wielding a stone axe, I broke the arms, the limbs, the balls of their finest warriors, my beauty blinding them, as it does all men, unmanning them in the way that King Kong was reduced to a mere simian whimper by beauteous Fay Wray whom I resemble left three-quarter profile if the key light is no more than five feet high during the close shot.
Here, Myra imagines herself in a version of the racist, imperialist adventure stories aimed at boys in European and settler-colonialist countries, stories which Vidal (b.1925) and his protagonist no doubt grew up reading. In Myra's fantasy, an ideal of (white) feminine beauty has essentially the same effect as white male guns. It implicitly signals the demise of the European colonial empires and the rise of American cultural imperialism through Hollywood - both racist, the latter comparing invaded indigenous peoples with an SFX gorilla. It also echoes the strand of popular second-wave feminism which favoured women behaving more like men. The quotation and my off-the-cuff analysis each have about the same word-count: Myra Breckinridge is very allusion-dense and I found almost too much to say about it.
For a reader who's a fan of 1930s-40s Hollywood movies, there is potentially an endless amount to say: the novel is replete with references to this era, and, since before her transition, Myra has been working on a book about them and real film critic Parker Tyler. There's a short review here from someone who does know the films and it evidently adds a lot more fun to the novel. There's one paragraph where Myra starts talking about 1960s cinema - which I do know. She goes on about "epicene O'Toole, the distracted Mastroianni, and the cheerfully incompetent Belmondo". There, I got a hint of what it must be like to read the rest of the book knowing the earlier films: the agreement, the disagreement, and especially the "I see why someone would say that, but…" - and how it would make the novel seem more about film and somewhat less about other stuff.
Myra's pronouncements about the decline of Hollywood seem absurd with hindsight, written just as the New Hollywood movement was getting in gear; it would soon to be responsible for many of the best US films of the second half of the 20th century. Her fascination with television commercials as a great new art form sounds merely daft now, but was very much a feature of its time when set alongside other books of the era I've read this year, Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images (1966) and Crash (1973) (the latter's narrator works for a TV-ad production company), as well as Annie Ernaux's account of living through that time in her memoir The Years.
Many critics, from time of publication onwards, pointed out that, in Myra's long digressions about contemporary culture, she appears to be a mouthpiece for Vidal's own opinions, at least as much as a character in her own right. At first I found these rants an interesting insight into the times, reading them as an agglomeration of uncommissioned newspaper columns, but around halfway through, they got repetitive and began to pall, especially as the prose became plainer and less entertaining. It felt as though the author had stopped trying. (He reportedly wrote the whole novel in a month.) Nonetheless, they add a meta quality to the novel. One of Myra / Vidal's hobbyhorses is the nouveau roman, and there are short chapters interpolated, pastiching its style, narrated as verbatim dictation recordings given to a secretary by Myra's sleazy former cowboy-movie star uncle Buck - who now runs a drama school of questionable quality, where Myra inveigles herself into a teaching role, pretending to be the widow of her pre-transition self, whom Buck remembers as his nephew Myron.
Aside from Golden Age Hollywood fabulousness, film criticism and getting her share of a family inheritance from Buck, megalomaniac Myra's other main aim in life is to establish a fem-dom cult that she considers will solve world overpopulation by curtailing births. (Overpopulation was another cultural meme of the 1960s and 70s, stemming from pre-Green Revolution projections of widespread starvation.) Her concern with overpopulation is entirely human-centred and eugenicist, concerned with making a world where her idea of the best humans can flourish, with plentiful food and resources, and has nothing at all to do with human destruction of the rest of nature.
The 1960s-70s counterculture and sexual revolution didn’t prioritise sexual consent in the way that the 2010s social justice movement does - and that especially shows in transgressive novels like Myra Breckinridge and Crash. Myra takes her lead from political activists who were prepared to use force in a very different sphere of life, and tries to start her revolution via the sexual harassment, assault and eventual rape of a strapping young Midwestern heterosexual male hunk at the drama school - much of this happening in a long scene written in the style of erotica. Breckinridge as a novel seems to have been designed to piss off almost everyone, liberal or conservative, in the late 60s, but this scene is one of the instances where it also pisses off groups who only got a significant political voice nearly 50 years later, especially in trans rights - it ends up echoing a contemporary stereotype of sexually predatory transwomen particularly associated with the concerns of TERFs/gender critical feminists (although they more usually talk of cis male sex offenders pretending to be trans in order to obtain further opportunities to offend). Myra strongly identifies as a woman while doing this, and sees herself as the same type as cougar Hollywood agent Letitia van Allen, a character whom she makes her new BFF (and whose later trajectory in the novel seems to have been designed to provoke liberals and feminists).
As for the much-loathed ending to Myra Breckinridge, and Myra herself, I see it as stemming from Gore Vidal's own bisexuality. There is a question that must be familiar to many other people - especially middle aged and older people who didn't grow up into contemporary queer youth communities - who are at least one of bi/switch/nonbinary, and who have a history of falling for people who are unidirectional or conventional in their desires and identification: "Do I want this person enough to ignore part of myself?" And Myra/Myron says "Yes". Vidal was never one for monogamous settling down, but that idea of shutting off part of oneself can be present in almost every encounter, and I would intuit it was something he knew. Myra/Myron's circumstances towards the end of the novel also have the potential to connect with those for whom medical issues preclude or problematise any physical transition and who make do with things as they are. (Again, especially older people, who'd have quietly ruled it out, whereas the young now would make more of an outward identity regardless.) But ostensibly, the protagonist's turn towards white-picket-fence cis heterosexuality, in the context of the late 1960s, seems like a rebellion against the norm of rebellion (only actually a norm in a few circles and cities, though it could have looked like a norm if you were in those places) - and a way for the novel to piss off liberals as well as conservatives. If you were liberal enough in those days to stick with the book until the end, it then rewards you by slapping you in the face with its conservative, contrariwise conclusion. Having a character share the name of Montag, protagonist of book-burning dystopia Fahrenheit 451 - adapted for film in 1966 - suggests Vidal's awareness of how objectionable his novel is. And of course, none of this is any bloody use for readers looking for early, at least somewhat-positive, representations of trans protagonists to celebrate in the present day - this is a novel that seems designed to be, above all, provocative and not useful, and it employs its characters to its own ends only.
It also makes it easier to understand why, in the song without which I probably would never have read this book, Gore Vidal is appended with "Oh, it makes me mad!" (words ranted by a Monty Python character in an audio sample). He rants, he provokes. The phrase could equally be said by him or about him.
(Read November 2019, reviewed December 2019)
I'd also kind-of conflated the notoriously bad film of Myra with the novel. But a longtime GR friend, who's read a lot more Vidal than most people, when I asked him which book to go for, recommended Myra Breckinridge. I assumed at first that he was taking the piss. But I'd noticed it was on the 1001. Then I looked through Harold Bloom's Western Canon list again and it was even on there? WTF? There is a lot of dull-looking 20th-century US fiction on Bloom's lists that I've never heard anyone else talk about anywhere (and for which his predictions of classic status are assuredly not coming true so far), but Myra Breckinridge is absolutely not what you'd think that old grump would have approved of. I was intrigued, and in the end my apprehension was beaten because I couldn't resist the opportunity to tick off another book on so many lists at once via such a short novel. (I still want to read The City and the Pillar, but there's a lot of other stuff that's higher priority for the moment.)
I'd long been aware that Myra Breckinridge, the novel, had been written to deliberately provoke readers of the late 1960s - and I figured from recent reviews that, fifty years later, it had become offensive in further ways, originally unintended, because of shifting values and especially the expectation of realistic and positive representations of trans people in fiction. But, both before and after reading, it also seemed to sit in a tradition of transgressive humour, much of it witty, but some more shock and offence-based such as is used by some drag queens in comedy - see for example this (negative) Guardian review of Bianca del Rio.
This year, I've edited some queer-theory academic papers, and that work indicated that in academia, there remains a sense of complexity and resistance to rigid categorisations, queerness as one could be confident of its meaning being understood on here a few years ago - beyond certain strict approaches now widely known from pop-culture and social media based activism. (i.e. approaches which exist as a front in a war for access to services, or legal recognition. For example in idea-space or art there may be fluidity in gender identification after a social, legal or surgical transition, but fictional characters like this may be very unhelpful if viewed as part of a culture-wide argument for government health services, and as such they are strongly discouraged by social media - even though, as queer theory can indicate, on a deeper level, further change isn't inherently wrong in any way, and also fits with the acceptance of non-binary, genderqueer, genderfluid and similar identities.) This, along with the late 1960s-early 1970s context of transgressive literary fiction and intellectual counterculture (e.g. J.G. Ballard's Crash) and elements of Gore Vidal's biography, informed my understanding of Myra Breckinridge.
The early part of the novel has one of those deliciously camp, waspish outrageous sort of voices which I first came to love as an Oscar Wilde-obsessed teenager in the 1990s. (There may not be a totally acceptable way to phrase this now, as it's a less acceptable sentiment.) It has that fascinating obliqueness - the hearing and interpretation even prompts a sort of mental proprioception - whereby one can never be entirely sure what is and is not serious, unless you know the person well … and even then, sometimes …
Such ambiguity does not work well in the age of Twitterstorms. It was a voice that once seemed to be associated with transwomen as well as with camp gay men and drag - on a general cultural level there didn't used to seem so much delineation between these identities. It would now be said that's because (other than Jan Morris) there was little representation of transwomen on their own terms, especially those who led 'ordinary' lives outside the entertainment sphere. Also due to lack of service provision: Quentin Crisp (b. 1908) said in the 1970s that had sex-change surgery been readily available when he was young, he would have gone for it. (It was done on a small scale in Weimar Germany, but not really accessible to a young British person.) And that cultural conflation was also a relic of legal repression, which in Britain and the US affected men who had sex with men or who were liable to the assumption that they did (but which was not as severe on lesbians). However, now, Myra Breckinridge is defined as a novel about a transwoman by a predominantly gay bisexual man, who presented in public as cis. (I don't know what, if anything, Vidal said about his own sense of gender identity - and in any case, such reflection would have been shaped by the categories and their boundaries as they were when he was forming his identity, and less by the rapid change in this area in the 2010s. He died in 2012.)
Alongside its affinity with old-school underground camp, the first page of Myra Breckinridge loudly proclaims colonialism:
Clad only in garter belt and one dress shield, I held off the entire elite of the Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for "why" or "because." Wielding a stone axe, I broke the arms, the limbs, the balls of their finest warriors, my beauty blinding them, as it does all men, unmanning them in the way that King Kong was reduced to a mere simian whimper by beauteous Fay Wray whom I resemble left three-quarter profile if the key light is no more than five feet high during the close shot.
Here, Myra imagines herself in a version of the racist, imperialist adventure stories aimed at boys in European and settler-colonialist countries, stories which Vidal (b.1925) and his protagonist no doubt grew up reading. In Myra's fantasy, an ideal of (white) feminine beauty has essentially the same effect as white male guns. It implicitly signals the demise of the European colonial empires and the rise of American cultural imperialism through Hollywood - both racist, the latter comparing invaded indigenous peoples with an SFX gorilla. It also echoes the strand of popular second-wave feminism which favoured women behaving more like men. The quotation and my off-the-cuff analysis each have about the same word-count: Myra Breckinridge is very allusion-dense and I found almost too much to say about it.
For a reader who's a fan of 1930s-40s Hollywood movies, there is potentially an endless amount to say: the novel is replete with references to this era, and, since before her transition, Myra has been working on a book about them and real film critic Parker Tyler. There's a short review here from someone who does know the films and it evidently adds a lot more fun to the novel. There's one paragraph where Myra starts talking about 1960s cinema - which I do know. She goes on about "epicene O'Toole, the distracted Mastroianni, and the cheerfully incompetent Belmondo". There, I got a hint of what it must be like to read the rest of the book knowing the earlier films: the agreement, the disagreement, and especially the "I see why someone would say that, but…" - and how it would make the novel seem more about film and somewhat less about other stuff.
Myra's pronouncements about the decline of Hollywood seem absurd with hindsight, written just as the New Hollywood movement was getting in gear; it would soon to be responsible for many of the best US films of the second half of the 20th century. Her fascination with television commercials as a great new art form sounds merely daft now, but was very much a feature of its time when set alongside other books of the era I've read this year, Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images (1966) and Crash (1973) (the latter's narrator works for a TV-ad production company), as well as Annie Ernaux's account of living through that time in her memoir The Years.
Many critics, from time of publication onwards, pointed out that, in Myra's long digressions about contemporary culture, she appears to be a mouthpiece for Vidal's own opinions, at least as much as a character in her own right. At first I found these rants an interesting insight into the times, reading them as an agglomeration of uncommissioned newspaper columns, but around halfway through, they got repetitive and began to pall, especially as the prose became plainer and less entertaining. It felt as though the author had stopped trying. (He reportedly wrote the whole novel in a month.) Nonetheless, they add a meta quality to the novel. One of Myra / Vidal's hobbyhorses is the nouveau roman, and there are short chapters interpolated, pastiching its style, narrated as verbatim dictation recordings given to a secretary by Myra's sleazy former cowboy-movie star uncle Buck - who now runs a drama school of questionable quality, where Myra inveigles herself into a teaching role, pretending to be the widow of her pre-transition self, whom Buck remembers as his nephew Myron.
Aside from Golden Age Hollywood fabulousness, film criticism and getting her share of a family inheritance from Buck, megalomaniac Myra's other main aim in life is to establish a fem-dom cult that she considers will solve world overpopulation by curtailing births. (Overpopulation was another cultural meme of the 1960s and 70s, stemming from pre-Green Revolution projections of widespread starvation.) Her concern with overpopulation is entirely human-centred and eugenicist, concerned with making a world where her idea of the best humans can flourish, with plentiful food and resources, and has nothing at all to do with human destruction of the rest of nature.
The 1960s-70s counterculture and sexual revolution didn’t prioritise sexual consent in the way that the 2010s social justice movement does - and that especially shows in transgressive novels like Myra Breckinridge and Crash. Myra takes her lead from political activists who were prepared to use force in a very different sphere of life, and tries to start her revolution via the sexual harassment, assault and eventual rape of a strapping young Midwestern heterosexual male hunk at the drama school - much of this happening in a long scene written in the style of erotica. Breckinridge as a novel seems to have been designed to piss off almost everyone, liberal or conservative, in the late 60s, but this scene is one of the instances where it also pisses off groups who only got a significant political voice nearly 50 years later, especially in trans rights - it ends up echoing a contemporary stereotype of sexually predatory transwomen particularly associated with the concerns of TERFs/gender critical feminists (although they more usually talk of cis male sex offenders pretending to be trans in order to obtain further opportunities to offend). Myra strongly identifies as a woman while doing this, and sees herself as the same type as cougar Hollywood agent Letitia van Allen, a character whom she makes her new BFF (and whose later trajectory in the novel seems to have been designed to provoke liberals and feminists).
As for the much-loathed ending to Myra Breckinridge, and Myra herself, I see it as stemming from Gore Vidal's own bisexuality. There is a question that must be familiar to many other people - especially middle aged and older people who didn't grow up into contemporary queer youth communities - who are at least one of bi/switch/nonbinary, and who have a history of falling for people who are unidirectional or conventional in their desires and identification: "Do I want this person enough to ignore part of myself?" And Myra/Myron says "Yes". Vidal was never one for monogamous settling down, but that idea of shutting off part of oneself can be present in almost every encounter, and I would intuit it was something he knew. Myra/Myron's circumstances towards the end of the novel also have the potential to connect with those for whom medical issues preclude or problematise any physical transition and who make do with things as they are. (Again, especially older people, who'd have quietly ruled it out, whereas the young now would make more of an outward identity regardless.) But ostensibly, the protagonist's turn towards white-picket-fence cis heterosexuality, in the context of the late 1960s, seems like a rebellion against the norm of rebellion (only actually a norm in a few circles and cities, though it could have looked like a norm if you were in those places) - and a way for the novel to piss off liberals as well as conservatives. If you were liberal enough in those days to stick with the book until the end, it then rewards you by slapping you in the face with its conservative, contrariwise conclusion. Having a character share the name of Montag, protagonist of book-burning dystopia Fahrenheit 451 - adapted for film in 1966 - suggests Vidal's awareness of how objectionable his novel is. And of course, none of this is any bloody use for readers looking for early, at least somewhat-positive, representations of trans protagonists to celebrate in the present day - this is a novel that seems designed to be, above all, provocative and not useful, and it employs its characters to its own ends only.
It also makes it easier to understand why, in the song without which I probably would never have read this book, Gore Vidal is appended with "Oh, it makes me mad!" (words ranted by a Monty Python character in an audio sample). He rants, he provokes. The phrase could equally be said by him or about him.
(Read November 2019, reviewed December 2019)
July 25, 2018
I'm going ahead and giving this little piece of madness 5 stars. Much of it is brilliant, hilarious, and bitchily delightful (I think I just created that adverb). A lot of it is also horrifying. Vidal takes the concept of the unreliable narrator to the next level in Myra. And there are things that simply wouldn't fly today--a lot of outmoded language and casual attitudes that made my jaw literally drop. But it is satire and it was published in 1968. Keeping that in mind, it's pretty revolutionary. There is one scene in this book that made me SO uncomfortable, I had to keep putting it down. And it felt endless. But it was totally appropriate for the story despite its overwhelming cringe factor. I recommend it to those who have an open mind and to those who could use a mind opening.
September 9, 2017
One of 1968's "shocking" bestsellers that is now a bit of a slog. (As Couples is to Updike; interestingly, the longueurs of both novels are attempts at Joycean stream of consciousness.) But Myra's voice is memorable, and that counts for something.
July 7, 2010
Writing does not get better than this, but it's definitely not for everyone. It's sick and twisted, but hilarious and beautifully written. Myra Breckinridge is the most powerful female character in books thanks to the voice given to her by Vidal. I could "listen" to her talk all day.
April 15, 2011
Reading any work by Gore Vidal, I am always amazed at how well it stands the test of time. Many of the references in Myra Breckinridge are dated (and certainly would have been at the time of its publication as well), and yet the themes of the story still ring eerily true today. Sexual politics, gender roles, the nature of celebrity – all of these ideas play out today much as they play out in the novel. In particular, the quest for celebrity in the book calls to mind reality television stars of today.
The novel, presented primarily as a series of diary entries, is, on the surface, the story of Myra Breckinridge as she moves to Hollywood to receive her rightful inheritance as the widow of one Myron Breckinridge. While there, she gets tangled up with an Academy that teaches young people to be stars and uses these students as pawns in her game to shift ideas about gender and sex.
The novel has a light, satirical tone, but do not let that fool you. Myra Breckinridge is a dark and thought-provoking tale, as shocking today as it certainly was upon its release in 1968. One should be able to pause between chuckles to really explore what Vidal is presenting. For just as Myra is a larger-than-life comedic character, her ideas about the world are large and important and intriguing.
The novel, presented primarily as a series of diary entries, is, on the surface, the story of Myra Breckinridge as she moves to Hollywood to receive her rightful inheritance as the widow of one Myron Breckinridge. While there, she gets tangled up with an Academy that teaches young people to be stars and uses these students as pawns in her game to shift ideas about gender and sex.
The novel has a light, satirical tone, but do not let that fool you. Myra Breckinridge is a dark and thought-provoking tale, as shocking today as it certainly was upon its release in 1968. One should be able to pause between chuckles to really explore what Vidal is presenting. For just as Myra is a larger-than-life comedic character, her ideas about the world are large and important and intriguing.
November 25, 2018
In the TLS of February 23 2018, Daniel Culpan ("a writer based in London") published a wide-ranging retrospective of Gore Vidal as novelist and critic that includes a convincing account of Myra Breckinridge's "comic nihilism":
For Culpan's full review, see: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/pu...
In it Vidal anticipates the sour, slackening coda of the great countercultural dream: "free love" being replaced by pornography; the avant-garde being killed by Warhol's embrace of consumerist Pop Art; [Vidal's] own adored Golden Age Hollywood cannibalized by reality television.
For Culpan's full review, see: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/pu...
November 5, 2013
If I had to choose one book that sums up what you might call ‘the gay sensibility’ it would be this, the story of a power-hungry transsexual rampaging her way through a dismal American college, ravishing hot jocks and referencing 40s films on every page. I was so obsessed by Myra Breckinridge in my 20s that I actually started writing my own diary in her voice. The sequel, Myron, is just as good. I was absolutely horrified when, after Vidal’s death, serious literary commentators suggested that he would be remembered not for his novels but for his quips and chat-show performances. This is just good old homophobia rearing its ugly head, of course – never mind that he was one of the most entertaining analysts of C20th America, let’s just dismiss him as a camp laugh. I’d say that his comic novels (particularly the Myra diptych, and Duluth) are his greatest achievement, but come on – Burr? Julian? Williwaw? Lincoln? I wish Myra herself would return to settle a few scores with her ‘art-deco lamp base’.
July 9, 2008
This starts out as a really funny, satirical look at Hollywood in the throes of the sexual revolution, but it just becomes tedious, pointless and mean-spirited, like pretty much all of Vidal's books, which for some reason I keep reading. Maybe that says something about me.
September 10, 2009
"I have no clear idea as to my ultimate identity once every fantasy has been acted out with living flesh. All that I do know is that I shall be freed of obsession and, in this at least, be like no one else who ever lived."
Thus is the admirable if impossible goal of Vidal's self-titled anti-heroine/hero(?)... It's probably no surprise that the pursuit of it, and the methods employed, lead into directions not anticipated. And as a result, the rewards are unexpected. From cynicism a kind of tenderness emerges in Myra's outlook. Along the way, Vidal allows himself to hit (or miss) several satirical targets and explore myriad possibilities of gender roles, sexual identity and power.
I was going to give this a very solid three stars and a high recommendation until I reached a couple of bravura passages which tipped the scales upward a solid notch. Your mileage may vary, but within this flippant framework Vidal manages to makes some thought-provoking points.
I might be the only one who sees a connection, but this deliberately transgressive bit of free impertinence crammed with pop culture archeology reminds me somewhat of Terry Southern's "Candy," except that Candy slayed all comers with complete cluelessness of her feminine charms whereas Myra is all too aware of them, and sets out on a path of deliberate destruction, vengeance, possession, power and fame. I compare the two also because the writers are just having a lot of fun with it, and so are we. I like the back and forth between Myra's diary and Buck Loner's tape recordings, each sizing up the other for the kill.
I can't decide, from sentence to sentence, how I feel about Vidal's tour de force approach. The parts where Myra says she doesn't feel like describing things or reconstructing dialogue strike me as a lazy copout; but Vidal can slough off any responsibility by saying it's the nature of his protagonist to do that sort of thing. Still, I'm probably overthinking this. I don't think Vidal set out to make great literature with this book, and yet there are bravura moments. The book strikes me overall as frivolous, and yet it's fun as hell. I love all the insider Hollywood references, and the sense of the decaying movie capital in the 1960s is well essayed. Vidal takes on a lot of satirical targets, shotgun-style.
I have to like any book, somewhat, that can riff on Parker Tyler. I like Tyler's film books. And I can't help but be giddy, regardless how far Vidal's tongue is in his cheek, when Myra says this: "Tyler's close scrutiny of the films of the Forties makes him our age's central thinker, if only because in the decade between 1935 and 1945, no irrelevant film was made in the United States." And later: "...I do entirely support [Myron Breckinridge's:] thesis that the films of 1935 to 1945 inclusive were the high point of Western culture."
Sue me, but I kind of agree.
The most famous or notorious part of the book is very likely a woman-on-man rape scene, the slow buildup and perpetration of which goes on for 30 pages in utmost detail. It takes one of the primal fantasies of the age before sexual enlightenment--playing doctor--and crafts it for the explicit age of Aquarius. It is probably the main reason this book sold millions of copies.
------
The following are some of my favorite passages from the book:
"But the very literalness of my victory deprived me of the anticipated glory. To my astonishment, I have now lost all interest in men. I have simply gone past them, as if I were a new creation, a mutant diverging from original stock to become something quite unlike its former self or any self known to the race. All that I want now in the way of human power is to make Mary-Ann love me so that I might continue to love her--even without possessing her--to the end of my days."
"But tonight she was subtly changed. I don't know whether it was the snaps at Scandia or the cold bright charm of the powerful Letitia or the knowledge that Rusty would never be hers again but whatever it was, she allowed my hand to rest a long moment on the entrance to the last fantasy which is of course the first reality. Ecstatically, I fingered the lovely shape whose secret I must know or die, whose maze I must thread as best I can or go mad for if I am to prevail I must soon come face to face with the Minotaur of dreams and confound him in his charneled lair, and in our heroic coupling know the last mystery: total power achieved not over man, not over woman but over the heraldic beast, the devouring monster, the maw of creation itself that spews us forth and sucks us back into the black oblivion where stars are made and energy waits to be born in order to begin once more the cycle of destruction and creation at whose apex now I stand, once man, now woman, and soon to be privy to what lies beyond the uterine door, the mystery of creation that I mean to shatter with the fierce thrust of a will that alone separates me from the nothing of eternity; and as I have conquered the male, absorbed and been absorbed by the female, I am at last outside the human scale, and so may render impotent even familiar banal ubiquitous death whose mouth I see smiling at me with moist coral lips between the legs of my beloved girl who is the unwitting instrument of victory, and the beautiful fact of my life's vision made all too perfect flesh."
"But Myron was tortured by having been attached to those male genitals which are linked to a power outside the man who sports them or, to be precise, they sport the man for they are peculiarly willful and separate and it is not for nothing that the simple boy so often says of his erection, partly as a joke but partly as a frightening fact, "He's got a head of his own." Indeed he has a head of his own and twice I have punished that head. Once by a literal decapitation, killing Myron so that Myra might be born and then, symbolically, by torturing and mocking Rusty's sex in order to avenge Myron for the countless times that he had been made victim by that mitred one-eyed beast, forever battering blindly at any orifice, seeking to scatter wide the dreaded seed that has already so filled up the world with superfluous people that our end is now at hand: through war and famine and the physical decadence of a race whose extinction is not only inevitable but, to my mind, desirable... for after me what new turn can the human take? Once I have comprehended the last mystery I shall be free to go without protest, full of wisdom, into night, happy in the knowledge that, above all men, I existed totally. Let the dust take me when the adventure's done and I shall make that dust glitter for all eternity with my marvelous fury. Meanwhile, I must change the last generation of man. I must bring back Eden. And I can, I am certain, for if there is a god in the human scale, I am she."
Thus is the admirable if impossible goal of Vidal's self-titled anti-heroine/hero(?)... It's probably no surprise that the pursuit of it, and the methods employed, lead into directions not anticipated. And as a result, the rewards are unexpected. From cynicism a kind of tenderness emerges in Myra's outlook. Along the way, Vidal allows himself to hit (or miss) several satirical targets and explore myriad possibilities of gender roles, sexual identity and power.
I was going to give this a very solid three stars and a high recommendation until I reached a couple of bravura passages which tipped the scales upward a solid notch. Your mileage may vary, but within this flippant framework Vidal manages to makes some thought-provoking points.
I might be the only one who sees a connection, but this deliberately transgressive bit of free impertinence crammed with pop culture archeology reminds me somewhat of Terry Southern's "Candy," except that Candy slayed all comers with complete cluelessness of her feminine charms whereas Myra is all too aware of them, and sets out on a path of deliberate destruction, vengeance, possession, power and fame. I compare the two also because the writers are just having a lot of fun with it, and so are we. I like the back and forth between Myra's diary and Buck Loner's tape recordings, each sizing up the other for the kill.
I can't decide, from sentence to sentence, how I feel about Vidal's tour de force approach. The parts where Myra says she doesn't feel like describing things or reconstructing dialogue strike me as a lazy copout; but Vidal can slough off any responsibility by saying it's the nature of his protagonist to do that sort of thing. Still, I'm probably overthinking this. I don't think Vidal set out to make great literature with this book, and yet there are bravura moments. The book strikes me overall as frivolous, and yet it's fun as hell. I love all the insider Hollywood references, and the sense of the decaying movie capital in the 1960s is well essayed. Vidal takes on a lot of satirical targets, shotgun-style.
I have to like any book, somewhat, that can riff on Parker Tyler. I like Tyler's film books. And I can't help but be giddy, regardless how far Vidal's tongue is in his cheek, when Myra says this: "Tyler's close scrutiny of the films of the Forties makes him our age's central thinker, if only because in the decade between 1935 and 1945, no irrelevant film was made in the United States." And later: "...I do entirely support [Myron Breckinridge's:] thesis that the films of 1935 to 1945 inclusive were the high point of Western culture."
Sue me, but I kind of agree.
The most famous or notorious part of the book is very likely a woman-on-man rape scene, the slow buildup and perpetration of which goes on for 30 pages in utmost detail. It takes one of the primal fantasies of the age before sexual enlightenment--playing doctor--and crafts it for the explicit age of Aquarius. It is probably the main reason this book sold millions of copies.
------
The following are some of my favorite passages from the book:
"But the very literalness of my victory deprived me of the anticipated glory. To my astonishment, I have now lost all interest in men. I have simply gone past them, as if I were a new creation, a mutant diverging from original stock to become something quite unlike its former self or any self known to the race. All that I want now in the way of human power is to make Mary-Ann love me so that I might continue to love her--even without possessing her--to the end of my days."
"But tonight she was subtly changed. I don't know whether it was the snaps at Scandia or the cold bright charm of the powerful Letitia or the knowledge that Rusty would never be hers again but whatever it was, she allowed my hand to rest a long moment on the entrance to the last fantasy which is of course the first reality. Ecstatically, I fingered the lovely shape whose secret I must know or die, whose maze I must thread as best I can or go mad for if I am to prevail I must soon come face to face with the Minotaur of dreams and confound him in his charneled lair, and in our heroic coupling know the last mystery: total power achieved not over man, not over woman but over the heraldic beast, the devouring monster, the maw of creation itself that spews us forth and sucks us back into the black oblivion where stars are made and energy waits to be born in order to begin once more the cycle of destruction and creation at whose apex now I stand, once man, now woman, and soon to be privy to what lies beyond the uterine door, the mystery of creation that I mean to shatter with the fierce thrust of a will that alone separates me from the nothing of eternity; and as I have conquered the male, absorbed and been absorbed by the female, I am at last outside the human scale, and so may render impotent even familiar banal ubiquitous death whose mouth I see smiling at me with moist coral lips between the legs of my beloved girl who is the unwitting instrument of victory, and the beautiful fact of my life's vision made all too perfect flesh."
"But Myron was tortured by having been attached to those male genitals which are linked to a power outside the man who sports them or, to be precise, they sport the man for they are peculiarly willful and separate and it is not for nothing that the simple boy so often says of his erection, partly as a joke but partly as a frightening fact, "He's got a head of his own." Indeed he has a head of his own and twice I have punished that head. Once by a literal decapitation, killing Myron so that Myra might be born and then, symbolically, by torturing and mocking Rusty's sex in order to avenge Myron for the countless times that he had been made victim by that mitred one-eyed beast, forever battering blindly at any orifice, seeking to scatter wide the dreaded seed that has already so filled up the world with superfluous people that our end is now at hand: through war and famine and the physical decadence of a race whose extinction is not only inevitable but, to my mind, desirable... for after me what new turn can the human take? Once I have comprehended the last mystery I shall be free to go without protest, full of wisdom, into night, happy in the knowledge that, above all men, I existed totally. Let the dust take me when the adventure's done and I shall make that dust glitter for all eternity with my marvelous fury. Meanwhile, I must change the last generation of man. I must bring back Eden. And I can, I am certain, for if there is a god in the human scale, I am she."
April 17, 2017
I can't remember anymore if I actually read this book in its entirety or just stood there in the library browsing it at length like some old raincoat-clad pervert. But I should be able to remember it better, even if it did happen in the late '70s when I was in junior high, because I clearly remember that 10 years earlier the first Playboy I ever saw had a pictorial in it from the awful movie they made shortly after Myra Breckinridge's publication. I've never seen the movie in its entirety either, so it's probably true I haven't actually read this book cover to cover. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing on either count. For all the press in the wake of Gore Vidal's recent death, this weak book is what seems to be held up as his life's work (that and Burr), but all that lasts with me is seeing the smarmy guy preening on Dick Cavett or Johny Carson. I know it's true that any man's death diminishes me, but I'm not sure the world's readers are all that diminished by the loss of Gore Vidal.
October 5, 2011
I want to resurrect Vidal and ask him, really? Really? This was worth your time?
It's a pretty weird book. If you know anything about it, you know why. I imagine it was rather shocking for its time, but now it feels as though it was written merely to shock.
It's a pretty weird book. If you know anything about it, you know why. I imagine it was rather shocking for its time, but now it feels as though it was written merely to shock.
July 10, 2019
When last we left Gore Vidal, we were worried about his politics. He was long considered a lion of the left for his sexual dissidence and his resistance to the religious right and to neoconservative imperialism; but worldwide events since his death in 2012 have put his fiercely atheist-pagan religious outlook, as well as his endorsement of economic populism and military isolationism, in a different and more troubling light, just as his cynicism about sexual ethics (not to mention rumors about his behavior) "hasn't aged well," as the Twitterati invariably say, in #metoo times.
So it is an odd choice for Vintage Books in 2019 to re-release what is perhaps Vidal's most incendiary novel, the rollicking Orlando-inspired 1968 satire and succès de scandale, Myra Breckinridge—and with an introduction by the provocateur Camille Paglia, no less, herself recently almost run out of Philadelphia's University of the Arts by aggrieved students for whom her longstanding dissent from feminist and queer orthodoxy is a threat to campus well-being.
Myra Breckinridge is narrated by its eponymous heroine, a transgender woman who is obsessed with classic Hollywood and bent on taking over an L.A. acting school (and the land it sits on) run by her ludicrous uncle, Buck Loner, a former star of Western radio dramas and movies. The novel has a fragmentary structure comprised of Myra's notebook entries; she often experiments with the precise notation of minute experience in a send-up of then-trendy theories about the death of the novel and its replacement by recursive, postmodern forms.
While all anyone knows now about Myra Breckinridge is its transgender theme, the revelations that Myra was once Myron, the supposedly dead husband she often recalls throughout the novel, is treated as a Crying-Game-like revelation in the novel's final quarter. For most of the book, we experience Myra as an imperious woman ("I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess," her monologue begins) and militant feminist who hopes to destroy traditional masculinity through sexual aggression against males. But she also plans to write a book on the mythic resonance of classic Hollywood, proclaiming:
Myra mourns the American culture that was vanquished by the reign of television and suburban conformity after World War II, much as Vidal the political commentator dated the death of the American republic to the founding of the CIA in 1947; and she mocks what she sees as the ignorance and moralism of "totalitarian-minded" Boomer youth, much as a Paglia today censures Millennials in the same Vidalian vocabulary—whether this is because the old always react the same way to the young or because the now-aging Millennials really are an echo of the now-evanescing Boomers, I will leave you to decide.
Myra's reactionary radicalism clearly echoes Vidal's own, and of the novel's autobiographical resonances, La Paglia writes in her introduction:
And Myra registers her own mixed feelings about the increasingly late 20th-century world in which she finds herself. On the one hand, she longs for the lost republic as enshrined in cinema, and on the other, she wishes to hasten the death of culture at the hands of TV commercials and the death of the human subject by the destruction of traditional gender roles:
Myra argues, as Vidal also did throughout his life, that normative heterosexuality and the nuclear family have been made obsolete by impending environmental catastrophe—not due to climate change, as we now believe, but because of the '60s-era scientific consensus that overpopulation would fatally deplete the planet's resources.
Myra predicts "famine for us all by 1974 or 1984," and notes that, "The physically and mentally weak who ordinarily would have died at birth now grow up to be revolutionaries in Africa, Asia and Harlem," an openly racist and eugenic argument for queer anti-natalism. Yet by the end of the novel, when physicians threaten to reverse Myra's gender reassignment, she protests to her notebook, "They will do to me what they did to Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala," now allying the queer gender warrior with anti-imperialism—another sign of Vidal's and his heroine's ambivalence. Whose side are they on? Is the insurgent queer an imperialist or a subaltern?
Despite the mixed feelings and thoughts detectable in the margins of the text, the novel's dominant note is a strutting amoralism, pagan and Nietzschean. Myra, after observing of a couple "the desire of each to exert power over the other," claims, "That is the one human constant, to which all else is tributary." This refusal to countenance morality leads Myra, as it led Vidal, to disparage monotheism, and especially its Judaic wellspring, as we see in this passage, where Myra mocks her Jewish dentist/analyst, Dr. Montag:
As Myra puts a queer spin on racism when she makes an anti-overpopulation argument for anti-natalism, she here queers anti-Semitism, a troubling gesture explained, though not justified, by the homophobia of the first wave of Jewish neoconservatives, and not only that of Joseph Epstein, who infamously wrote in 1970, "I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth," but also in Cynthia Ozick's response to E. M. Forster's posthumously published gay novel, Maurice.
Ozick writes that Forster's liberalism is compromised by his relativistic willingness to betray his country before he would betray his "friend"—a word Ozick construes as a gay code term for "lover." Ozick responds to this erotic but not national fidelity with an Arnoldian advocacy for the Hellenic and the Hebraic: she contrasts what she sees as Forster's queer relativism with the natural imperative to reproduce represented by Demeter and the foundation of universally-binding ethical law she locates in the Covenant.
Myra, by contrast, wishes to destroy these supposed "naturals" and "universals," first by abolishing masculinity, at least in her own arena of Buck Loner's school. She attempts to accomplish this aim by the long grooming of her manly student, Rusty Godowski (note the mockingly monotheistic surname—man made in the image of the Lord). This seduction and stalking climaxes in a slow, clinical, nightmarish scene of anal violation in the school's infirmary. Following this "victory" over Rusty, Myra turns her predatory attention to his girlfriend, Mary-Ann, and, having penetrated to the inner sanctum of manhood, now wishes to enter into what she imagines are the female mysteries:
In this passage, which presages Paglia's animadversions on the "womb/tomb" of "female nature" in Sexual Personae, Myra suggests that gender is a journey for the amoral soul: from vulnerable masculinity to predatory femininity to the dissolution of the ego in a return to uterine nature. Yet Vidal's narrative has its masculine revenge on Myra's feminist hubris, for the ultimate form her ego-death takes is traditional femininity on the suburban model: a tender longing for the gentle Mary-Ann. That this final transformation, at the novel's end, issues in a conventional (if child-free) heterosexual marriage between Mary-Ann and the uxorious Myron is the novel's crowning irony.
Other Goodreads reviewers, not having received Vidal's Nietzschean memo about the non-existence of morality, pronounce Myra Breckinridge "misogynist," "transphobic," and "anti-Semitic." And, if we can overlook some of the anachronism involved in these judgments, it is all those things: it's aged poorly, as I suggested at the outset. Vidal is reactionary from the perspective of a readership that lives his most radical speculations as everyday life, as the substance of the quotidian, and is therefore affronted by the carapace of camp irony and violent outrageousness with which he guards the sincerity of his romping novel. His tone of sportive exaggeration, his plot that literalizes stereotype and glamorizes every moral transgression, makes Myra Breckinridge feel like a concession to the traditionalist's fears, like some fever dream of Pat Buchanan's or Rod Dreher's.
On the other hand, we can find some currents in contemporary intellectual and avant-garde culture that Vidal's scandalous novel prefigures. Take, for instance, the more esoteric forms of gender theory—not the gay-marriage-like public liberal arguments for treating everyone equally regardless of gender identity, but rather the advocacy for trans experience as an anti-humanist vanguard. When Andrea Long Chu argues, in her celebrated essay, "On Liking Women," that each transgender woman has wounded patriarchy by literally subtracting a man from the planet, motivated by desire's anti-reproductive dysteleology, we hear an echo of Myra's desire for the abolition of men and of her will to power—and it's no surprise to find Chu praising the novel in 2018.
Likewise, the trans woman who writes under the nom de guerre n1x calls for gender accelerationism in the name of the "autonomy of objects," a development portended by transgenderism's technologically-enabled removal of femininity from any fiction of a biological base as imposed by masculine ideology going back, again, to Genesis. This decoupling of gender from nature makes the male obsolete, since reproduction will now occur machinically rather than biologically: artificial intelligences are "the only daughters that trans women will ever bear," just as the novel we read is Myra's only offspring. For this proposition, too, Myra would cheer, if only she could understand the theoretical jargon of n1x's chilly manifesto—some of which admittedly defeated me as well; I am reminded of Vidal's quip, in an essay on Montaigne, that he never read the French author's philosophical piece, "Apology for Raymond Sebond," on the grounds that he never thought Sebond needed any apology.
I would refer to Chu's argument as "left-wing" and n1x's as "right-wing," but this is only to signal their respective literary statuses, not an actual political dispute: Chu is in humanities academe, publishes in the para-academic n+1, and puts things in the left-Hegelian register of the post-'60s social movements as canonized by academe; whereas n1x writes pseudonymously, seems to be a coder rather than a humanist, affiliates with the likes of Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug, and writes in the apocalyptic Lovecraftian and right-Deleuzean tones of the neoreactionary movement.
Yet there is little meaningful ideological difference between their twin proposals for the pursuit of desire and identity past all currently settled forms of order. Left-Hegelian and right-Deleuzean might be the same theoretical body outfitted in office-hour pastels and Goth club gear, respectively, but the vision of archaic Futurism, whether conveyed in melancholic or ecstatic tones, the sublime (even orgasmic) reduction of "man" to chthonic and primordial muck within the Moloch murder-machine of modernity, hasn't changed much since Marinetti crashed his car into a muddy Milanese ditch, since Baudelaire picked his poison bouquet on Haussmann's Paris boulevards.
And call them left or right—as we used to say in the '90s, "socially liberal, fiscally conservative"—the Futurists appear to have won, or else why do the multinational corporations drape themselves in the rainbow flag if not to signal the final detachment of sex from reproduction and capital from production, as foreshadowed back in the last millennium by the Catholics' placing the sodomites and usurers in the same circle of hell and the Marxists' pronouncing homosexuality "bourgeois decadence" to be politically corrected by The Revolution?
There's only one problem with this seeming mainstream triumph of the queer, though: it leaves profit intact, one last norm to be respected or worshipped. But neither Vidal nor his heroine-spokeswoman praised profit as such—only power. Myra is an aesthete, consummating her will in the flesh and in writing, without regard to rational self-interest. If all she wanted was to inherit the grounds of her uncle's acting school, she would have been better off presenting herself to him as his nephew, Myron. Her attempt to swindle her uncle out of what he actually owes her is just another instance of her artistry, echoed by her author's positioning this land-grab as the engine of the sometimes nouveau-roman's such-as-it-is plot. Even commercials for Myra are strictly artistic phenomena; their mass audience, by contrast, is too stupid to live. All celebrants of capitalism's aesthetic sublimity, from Paglia herself to the neoreactionaries, must finally confront the lowest-common-denominator philistinism it inevitably enjoins.
The aesthete's nihilism takes us well below the bottom line—to the grave, to the earth or sea where we were incubated and where we will molder. She takes us there to show us that art, whose value can't be calculated and whose worth may be as endless as desire, is the only challenge we have to offer death, albeit perhaps just n1x's "affirmative death drive." If this is true—and I concede that the question remains open; I have my humanist days too—then the denouncers of good art might be more deadly than the most wicked of artists.
So it is an odd choice for Vintage Books in 2019 to re-release what is perhaps Vidal's most incendiary novel, the rollicking Orlando-inspired 1968 satire and succès de scandale, Myra Breckinridge—and with an introduction by the provocateur Camille Paglia, no less, herself recently almost run out of Philadelphia's University of the Arts by aggrieved students for whom her longstanding dissent from feminist and queer orthodoxy is a threat to campus well-being.
Myra Breckinridge is narrated by its eponymous heroine, a transgender woman who is obsessed with classic Hollywood and bent on taking over an L.A. acting school (and the land it sits on) run by her ludicrous uncle, Buck Loner, a former star of Western radio dramas and movies. The novel has a fragmentary structure comprised of Myra's notebook entries; she often experiments with the precise notation of minute experience in a send-up of then-trendy theories about the death of the novel and its replacement by recursive, postmodern forms.
While all anyone knows now about Myra Breckinridge is its transgender theme, the revelations that Myra was once Myron, the supposedly dead husband she often recalls throughout the novel, is treated as a Crying-Game-like revelation in the novel's final quarter. For most of the book, we experience Myra as an imperious woman ("I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess," her monologue begins) and militant feminist who hopes to destroy traditional masculinity through sexual aggression against males. But she also plans to write a book on the mythic resonance of classic Hollywood, proclaiming:
[T]he films of 1935 to 1945 inclusive were the high point of Western culture, completing what began that day in theatre of Dionysos when Aeschylus first spoke to the Athenians.
Myra mourns the American culture that was vanquished by the reign of television and suburban conformity after World War II, much as Vidal the political commentator dated the death of the American republic to the founding of the CIA in 1947; and she mocks what she sees as the ignorance and moralism of "totalitarian-minded" Boomer youth, much as a Paglia today censures Millennials in the same Vidalian vocabulary—whether this is because the old always react the same way to the young or because the now-aging Millennials really are an echo of the now-evanescing Boomers, I will leave you to decide.
Myra's reactionary radicalism clearly echoes Vidal's own, and of the novel's autobiographical resonances, La Paglia writes in her introduction:
Myra is dedicated to Vidal's friend Christopher Isherwood, author of the autobiographical Berlin Stories, which inspired the musical and movie Cabaret, set in decadent Weimar Germany. In his response to Vidal, Isherwood called Myra a "very subtle psychological self-portrait"—a remark that most critics have taken as a joke. But Isherwood was right: the more we have learned from Vidal's biographers about his turbulent emotional history and hyperactive sex life, the clearer it is that Myra Breckinridge is a dreamlike distillation of Vidal's aspirations, passions, compulsions, and fears.
And Myra registers her own mixed feelings about the increasingly late 20th-century world in which she finds herself. On the one hand, she longs for the lost republic as enshrined in cinema, and on the other, she wishes to hasten the death of culture at the hands of TV commercials and the death of the human subject by the destruction of traditional gender roles:
As usual, I am ambivalent. On the one hand, I am intellectually devoted to the idea of the old America. I believe in justice, I want redress for all wrongs done, I want the good life—if such a thing exists—accessible to all. Yet, emotionally, I would be only too happy to become world dictator, if only to fulfill my mission: the destruction of the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood in the race in order to realign the sexes, thus reducing population while increasing human happiness and preparing humanity for its next stage. (Vidal's italics)
Myra argues, as Vidal also did throughout his life, that normative heterosexuality and the nuclear family have been made obsolete by impending environmental catastrophe—not due to climate change, as we now believe, but because of the '60s-era scientific consensus that overpopulation would fatally deplete the planet's resources.
Myra predicts "famine for us all by 1974 or 1984," and notes that, "The physically and mentally weak who ordinarily would have died at birth now grow up to be revolutionaries in Africa, Asia and Harlem," an openly racist and eugenic argument for queer anti-natalism. Yet by the end of the novel, when physicians threaten to reverse Myra's gender reassignment, she protests to her notebook, "They will do to me what they did to Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala," now allying the queer gender warrior with anti-imperialism—another sign of Vidal's and his heroine's ambivalence. Whose side are they on? Is the insurgent queer an imperialist or a subaltern?
Despite the mixed feelings and thoughts detectable in the margins of the text, the novel's dominant note is a strutting amoralism, pagan and Nietzschean. Myra, after observing of a couple "the desire of each to exert power over the other," claims, "That is the one human constant, to which all else is tributary." This refusal to countenance morality leads Myra, as it led Vidal, to disparage monotheism, and especially its Judaic wellspring, as we see in this passage, where Myra mocks her Jewish dentist/analyst, Dr. Montag:
Being Jewish as well as neo-Freudian, he is not able to divest himself entirely of the Law of Moses. For the Jew, the family is everything; if it had not been, that religion which they so cherish (but happily do not practice) would have long since ended and with it their baleful sense of identity. As a result, the Jew finds literally demoralizing the normal human sexual drive toward promiscuity. Also, the Old Testament injunction not to look upon the father's nakedness is the core to a puritanism which finds unbearable the thought that the male in himself might possess an intrinsic attractiveness, either aesthetically or sensually. In fact, they hate the male body and ritually tear the penis in order to remind the man so damaged that his sex is unlovely. It is, all in all, a religion even more dreadful than Christianity.
As Myra puts a queer spin on racism when she makes an anti-overpopulation argument for anti-natalism, she here queers anti-Semitism, a troubling gesture explained, though not justified, by the homophobia of the first wave of Jewish neoconservatives, and not only that of Joseph Epstein, who infamously wrote in 1970, "I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth," but also in Cynthia Ozick's response to E. M. Forster's posthumously published gay novel, Maurice.
Ozick writes that Forster's liberalism is compromised by his relativistic willingness to betray his country before he would betray his "friend"—a word Ozick construes as a gay code term for "lover." Ozick responds to this erotic but not national fidelity with an Arnoldian advocacy for the Hellenic and the Hebraic: she contrasts what she sees as Forster's queer relativism with the natural imperative to reproduce represented by Demeter and the foundation of universally-binding ethical law she locates in the Covenant.
Myra, by contrast, wishes to destroy these supposed "naturals" and "universals," first by abolishing masculinity, at least in her own arena of Buck Loner's school. She attempts to accomplish this aim by the long grooming of her manly student, Rusty Godowski (note the mockingly monotheistic surname—man made in the image of the Lord). This seduction and stalking climaxes in a slow, clinical, nightmarish scene of anal violation in the school's infirmary. Following this "victory" over Rusty, Myra turns her predatory attention to his girlfriend, Mary-Ann, and, having penetrated to the inner sanctum of manhood, now wishes to enter into what she imagines are the female mysteries:
Ecstatically, I fingered the lovely shape whose secret I must know or die, whose maze I must thread as best I can or go mad for if I am to prevail I must soon come face to face with the Minotaur of dreams and confound him in his charneled lair, and in our heroic coupling know the last mystery: total power achieved not over man, not over woman but over the heraldic beast, the devouring monster, the maw of creation itself that spews us forth and sucks us back into the black oblivion where stars are made and energy waits to be born in order to begin once more the cycle of destruction and creation at whose apex now I stand, once man, now woman, and soon to be privy to what lies beyond the uterine door, the mystery of creation that I mean to shatter with the fierce thrust of a will that alone separates me from the nothing of eternity; and as I have conquered the male, absorbed and been absorbed by the female, I am at last outside the human scale, and so may render impotent even familiar banal ubiquitous death whose mouth I see smiling at me with moist coral lips between the legs of my beloved girl who is the unwitting instrument of victory, and the beautiful fact of my life's vision made all too perfect flesh.
In this passage, which presages Paglia's animadversions on the "womb/tomb" of "female nature" in Sexual Personae, Myra suggests that gender is a journey for the amoral soul: from vulnerable masculinity to predatory femininity to the dissolution of the ego in a return to uterine nature. Yet Vidal's narrative has its masculine revenge on Myra's feminist hubris, for the ultimate form her ego-death takes is traditional femininity on the suburban model: a tender longing for the gentle Mary-Ann. That this final transformation, at the novel's end, issues in a conventional (if child-free) heterosexual marriage between Mary-Ann and the uxorious Myron is the novel's crowning irony.
Other Goodreads reviewers, not having received Vidal's Nietzschean memo about the non-existence of morality, pronounce Myra Breckinridge "misogynist," "transphobic," and "anti-Semitic." And, if we can overlook some of the anachronism involved in these judgments, it is all those things: it's aged poorly, as I suggested at the outset. Vidal is reactionary from the perspective of a readership that lives his most radical speculations as everyday life, as the substance of the quotidian, and is therefore affronted by the carapace of camp irony and violent outrageousness with which he guards the sincerity of his romping novel. His tone of sportive exaggeration, his plot that literalizes stereotype and glamorizes every moral transgression, makes Myra Breckinridge feel like a concession to the traditionalist's fears, like some fever dream of Pat Buchanan's or Rod Dreher's.
On the other hand, we can find some currents in contemporary intellectual and avant-garde culture that Vidal's scandalous novel prefigures. Take, for instance, the more esoteric forms of gender theory—not the gay-marriage-like public liberal arguments for treating everyone equally regardless of gender identity, but rather the advocacy for trans experience as an anti-humanist vanguard. When Andrea Long Chu argues, in her celebrated essay, "On Liking Women," that each transgender woman has wounded patriarchy by literally subtracting a man from the planet, motivated by desire's anti-reproductive dysteleology, we hear an echo of Myra's desire for the abolition of men and of her will to power—and it's no surprise to find Chu praising the novel in 2018.
Likewise, the trans woman who writes under the nom de guerre n1x calls for gender accelerationism in the name of the "autonomy of objects," a development portended by transgenderism's technologically-enabled removal of femininity from any fiction of a biological base as imposed by masculine ideology going back, again, to Genesis. This decoupling of gender from nature makes the male obsolete, since reproduction will now occur machinically rather than biologically: artificial intelligences are "the only daughters that trans women will ever bear," just as the novel we read is Myra's only offspring. For this proposition, too, Myra would cheer, if only she could understand the theoretical jargon of n1x's chilly manifesto—some of which admittedly defeated me as well; I am reminded of Vidal's quip, in an essay on Montaigne, that he never read the French author's philosophical piece, "Apology for Raymond Sebond," on the grounds that he never thought Sebond needed any apology.
I would refer to Chu's argument as "left-wing" and n1x's as "right-wing," but this is only to signal their respective literary statuses, not an actual political dispute: Chu is in humanities academe, publishes in the para-academic n+1, and puts things in the left-Hegelian register of the post-'60s social movements as canonized by academe; whereas n1x writes pseudonymously, seems to be a coder rather than a humanist, affiliates with the likes of Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug, and writes in the apocalyptic Lovecraftian and right-Deleuzean tones of the neoreactionary movement.
Yet there is little meaningful ideological difference between their twin proposals for the pursuit of desire and identity past all currently settled forms of order. Left-Hegelian and right-Deleuzean might be the same theoretical body outfitted in office-hour pastels and Goth club gear, respectively, but the vision of archaic Futurism, whether conveyed in melancholic or ecstatic tones, the sublime (even orgasmic) reduction of "man" to chthonic and primordial muck within the Moloch murder-machine of modernity, hasn't changed much since Marinetti crashed his car into a muddy Milanese ditch, since Baudelaire picked his poison bouquet on Haussmann's Paris boulevards.
And call them left or right—as we used to say in the '90s, "socially liberal, fiscally conservative"—the Futurists appear to have won, or else why do the multinational corporations drape themselves in the rainbow flag if not to signal the final detachment of sex from reproduction and capital from production, as foreshadowed back in the last millennium by the Catholics' placing the sodomites and usurers in the same circle of hell and the Marxists' pronouncing homosexuality "bourgeois decadence" to be politically corrected by The Revolution?
There's only one problem with this seeming mainstream triumph of the queer, though: it leaves profit intact, one last norm to be respected or worshipped. But neither Vidal nor his heroine-spokeswoman praised profit as such—only power. Myra is an aesthete, consummating her will in the flesh and in writing, without regard to rational self-interest. If all she wanted was to inherit the grounds of her uncle's acting school, she would have been better off presenting herself to him as his nephew, Myron. Her attempt to swindle her uncle out of what he actually owes her is just another instance of her artistry, echoed by her author's positioning this land-grab as the engine of the sometimes nouveau-roman's such-as-it-is plot. Even commercials for Myra are strictly artistic phenomena; their mass audience, by contrast, is too stupid to live. All celebrants of capitalism's aesthetic sublimity, from Paglia herself to the neoreactionaries, must finally confront the lowest-common-denominator philistinism it inevitably enjoins.
The aesthete's nihilism takes us well below the bottom line—to the grave, to the earth or sea where we were incubated and where we will molder. She takes us there to show us that art, whose value can't be calculated and whose worth may be as endless as desire, is the only challenge we have to offer death, albeit perhaps just n1x's "affirmative death drive." If this is true—and I concede that the question remains open; I have my humanist days too—then the denouncers of good art might be more deadly than the most wicked of artists.
April 28, 2021
There is maybe only one word to be said about this book: bizarre! I listen to this book in the audible format while partially following along with the Kindle edition. This is another one of those books that I have heard about for a long time but I have to admit I don’t think I ever really understood what it was all about. This book was published at a time when transsexual was definitely not understood. Not that it has broken through into any understanding really these days yet. And the attitude about it in this book is not one of sensitivity. In fact I have this feeling that giving at four stars may be a mark of my gross insensitivity. I am pretty sure that bizarre is not a word that transsexuals want to have associated with their reality.
September 7, 2017
Vidal logra atraparte desde la primera página. Capítulos breves van desenvolviendo una personalidad perversamente exquisita: Myra Breckinridge: “que no será poseída nunca por ningún hombre”.
Soberbiamente, Vidal logra ir tejiendo un conjunto complejo y organizado de quién es Myra, cómo llegó a ser quién es, quién fue, de qué época estamos hablando, al mismo tiempo que da una cátedra de literatura contemporánea: “no empezaré por el principio porque no hay un principio”, “pero dejémonos de metáforas. Nada se parece a nada. Las cosas son ellas mismas completamente y no necesitan interpretación”.
Escatológica, brutal, directa; cada página de esta novela es un mazazo durísimo a las convenciones sociales de su momento histórico, que tristemente pareciera seguir siendo el nuestro: un momento en donde la intolerancia y la incomprensión, en donde los estudios de género han hecho grandes avances pero aún hay batallas pendientes, un momento donde la incomprensión por lo otro, por lo ajeno, sigue siendo “justificante” para agredir, pisotear, ningunear y herir a cualquiera que no esté dentro de los roles definidos por “la sociedad”.
Mi recomendación sería que entraran a leerla sin leer nada más. Solo abriendo el libro por la primera página y yéndose directamente hasta el final. Se puede, porque es amena, es entretenida, es mordaz; Myra es un personaje inolvidable, una verdadera mujer con una lengua llena de veneno y furia, una mujer increiblemente segura, y una gran narradora.
Nunca había leído nada de Vidal y ahora quiero leerle todo.
Es el tipo de novelas que me hace detener la lectura para escribirle al Arturo y recomendársela. Así de pinche buena.
A ratos me recordaba mucho las pláticas que tenía con dos de mis grandes maestros, el Genaro y el Agustín, por las múltiples referencias al cine, a actores, a tramas y personajes, a situaciones particulares del cine y que Myra traslapa a la realidad, a su realidad, a la realidad de la novela que no es otra que no podamos imaginar sin dificultad, gracias a su detalle en las atmósferas, en las imágenes, en la narración, en muchas ocasiones: muy gráfica y detallada.
En la contraportada, citan a Bloom quien afirma de la novela: “Myra Breckinridge continúa proporcionándome un placer perverso”. Eso: “placer perverso”, sin caer en puerilidades ni vulgaridades, agregándole quizá la palabra “narcisista”, para hablar de una Myra perversamente narcisista.
Soberbiamente, Vidal logra ir tejiendo un conjunto complejo y organizado de quién es Myra, cómo llegó a ser quién es, quién fue, de qué época estamos hablando, al mismo tiempo que da una cátedra de literatura contemporánea: “no empezaré por el principio porque no hay un principio”, “pero dejémonos de metáforas. Nada se parece a nada. Las cosas son ellas mismas completamente y no necesitan interpretación”.
Escatológica, brutal, directa; cada página de esta novela es un mazazo durísimo a las convenciones sociales de su momento histórico, que tristemente pareciera seguir siendo el nuestro: un momento en donde la intolerancia y la incomprensión, en donde los estudios de género han hecho grandes avances pero aún hay batallas pendientes, un momento donde la incomprensión por lo otro, por lo ajeno, sigue siendo “justificante” para agredir, pisotear, ningunear y herir a cualquiera que no esté dentro de los roles definidos por “la sociedad”.
Mi recomendación sería que entraran a leerla sin leer nada más. Solo abriendo el libro por la primera página y yéndose directamente hasta el final. Se puede, porque es amena, es entretenida, es mordaz; Myra es un personaje inolvidable, una verdadera mujer con una lengua llena de veneno y furia, una mujer increiblemente segura, y una gran narradora.
Nunca había leído nada de Vidal y ahora quiero leerle todo.
Es el tipo de novelas que me hace detener la lectura para escribirle al Arturo y recomendársela. Así de pinche buena.
A ratos me recordaba mucho las pláticas que tenía con dos de mis grandes maestros, el Genaro y el Agustín, por las múltiples referencias al cine, a actores, a tramas y personajes, a situaciones particulares del cine y que Myra traslapa a la realidad, a su realidad, a la realidad de la novela que no es otra que no podamos imaginar sin dificultad, gracias a su detalle en las atmósferas, en las imágenes, en la narración, en muchas ocasiones: muy gráfica y detallada.
En la contraportada, citan a Bloom quien afirma de la novela: “Myra Breckinridge continúa proporcionándome un placer perverso”. Eso: “placer perverso”, sin caer en puerilidades ni vulgaridades, agregándole quizá la palabra “narcisista”, para hablar de una Myra perversamente narcisista.
August 11, 2016
What can one say about Myra Breckinridge, as a transsexual in 2016? I loved it, I hated it. There are really three major problems with Myra Breckinridge: 1. the overt racism throughout the text; 2. Myra's obsession with raping straight trade; 3. (spoiler) Myra's forced detransition in the final gasp of the book and her subsequent disavowal of her entire life and personality as Myra.
The book is hilarious from start to finish - and full of memorable, highly quotable lines ("Myra Breckinridge is a dish and don't you forget it motherfuckers, as the children say nowadays"). And Vidal's essential messages about the sexual revolution - including the idea that ultimately sexual radicals will fall back into the heteronormativity which they'd been so intent on destroying - were prescient to say the least, and remain surprisingly relevant 48 years later.
Unlike contemporaneous depictions of trans people by cis writers, such as Hosanna by Michel Tremblay (1975), at least Myra Breckinridge (if you leave out the final chapter) is not drawn as pathetic. Myra Breckinridge is Woman Triumphant.
The book is hilarious from start to finish - and full of memorable, highly quotable lines ("Myra Breckinridge is a dish and don't you forget it motherfuckers, as the children say nowadays"). And Vidal's essential messages about the sexual revolution - including the idea that ultimately sexual radicals will fall back into the heteronormativity which they'd been so intent on destroying - were prescient to say the least, and remain surprisingly relevant 48 years later.
Unlike contemporaneous depictions of trans people by cis writers, such as Hosanna by Michel Tremblay (1975), at least Myra Breckinridge (if you leave out the final chapter) is not drawn as pathetic. Myra Breckinridge is Woman Triumphant.
January 6, 2013
I had watched the film version with Raquel Welch and Mae West and found it absolutely incoherent. When I found the book in the Free Books section of my public library, I decided, "Why not? Maybe I can get a little something extra out of it."
True, it is every bit misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic, and pro-rape as everyone says it is. There we go, five things I already dislike. Despite all of this, however, I'm ashamed to say that I actually *really* enjoyed this one, though I'm not all that sure why. Perhaps it's Myra's character and the way she writes this journal of hers. Perhaps I went into the novel reminding myself that it was a product of its time-- a lot has changed in the past 45 years. Perhaps I'm just a terrible person.
Bottom line, if loving Myra Breckinridge is wrong, then I don't want to be right.
True, it is every bit misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic, and pro-rape as everyone says it is. There we go, five things I already dislike. Despite all of this, however, I'm ashamed to say that I actually *really* enjoyed this one, though I'm not all that sure why. Perhaps it's Myra's character and the way she writes this journal of hers. Perhaps I went into the novel reminding myself that it was a product of its time-- a lot has changed in the past 45 years. Perhaps I'm just a terrible person.
Bottom line, if loving Myra Breckinridge is wrong, then I don't want to be right.
September 8, 2012
I fully intend to walk around saying, "I am Myra Breckenridge whom no man will ever possess."
Look, its politics are a bit...outmoded. Particularly the pit-pat resolution (I won't spoil this one), which seems to reiterate a normative gender system and narrative structure. The plot is a bit flimsy, or rather, is stretched for quite a long time, when it could easily have been told as a novella. But these things shouldn't keep you from reading it, because it's also ridiculously fun & offensive, & Myra is a monster at the same time that she's, like, my new role model? Well, parts of Myra, at any rate.
Look, its politics are a bit...outmoded. Particularly the pit-pat resolution (I won't spoil this one), which seems to reiterate a normative gender system and narrative structure. The plot is a bit flimsy, or rather, is stretched for quite a long time, when it could easily have been told as a novella. But these things shouldn't keep you from reading it, because it's also ridiculously fun & offensive, & Myra is a monster at the same time that she's, like, my new role model? Well, parts of Myra, at any rate.
September 24, 2017
I can understand why it gained notoriety at the time that it came out; tran-sexual, pan-sexual Myron/Myra Breckenridge comes to Hollywood to claim an inheritance from his/her Uncle while following her own delusions of becoming a sexual ubermensch.
While there is no question of Vidal's literary prowess, this book is probably not the best example of his abilities.
Myra condemns nearly every aspect of American culture and society, while ignoring her own fascination with the equally shallow golden age of Hollywood of the 1930s and 40s. In all, the story comes off as an exercise in Nihilism.
While there is no question of Vidal's literary prowess, this book is probably not the best example of his abilities.
Myra condemns nearly every aspect of American culture and society, while ignoring her own fascination with the equally shallow golden age of Hollywood of the 1930s and 40s. In all, the story comes off as an exercise in Nihilism.
August 26, 2013
Just reread this after thirty years and, wow, it's better than I remembered, full of incisive cultural critique and hilarious lines. The transsexual angle is not realistic, but one forgives Vidal his absurd conceits because it's all in the name of mocking the binary gender system. The story does end rather abruptly, but there is a sequel.
July 14, 2018
"Frankly I can think of no pleasure greater than to approach an open face and swiftly say whatever needs to be said to shut it."
"Like so many male narcissists, he is, paradoxically, modest: he enjoys revealing himself but only on his own terms."
"'Whenever I hear the word 'smegma', I become physically ill.'"
January 26, 2015
Myra Breckenridge is a transgressive piece of fiction that felt like a Palahniuk work before his artistic tendencies even bloomed.
The psychological profile of many of the characters was completely captivating and I'm persuaded that Vidal is alot more edgy than I first thought.. MUCH recommended.
The psychological profile of many of the characters was completely captivating and I'm persuaded that Vidal is alot more edgy than I first thought.. MUCH recommended.
April 30, 2014
I knew about this book before I read it. Nevertheless, it was the funniest, craziest thing I ever read. By the fourth page, I realized there was nothing else like it on earth.
February 25, 2015
INsolito. Immagino che in quegli anni abbia fatto parecchio scalpore. Oggi può sembrare innocuo.
Comunque è divertente e acuto nel mostrare quello spicchio particolare di società.
Comunque è divertente e acuto nel mostrare quello spicchio particolare di società.
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