Um. Wow. I’m not sure where to start with this book. I do know this is all going to be spoilers, so you have been warned.
It’s bizarre and at times emotionally scarring, and for a while I was considering not finishing the last 60 or so pages because I was terrified of what I might have to read. Sure, sex-change operations and schemes to get revenge on the male gender are all fun and games until I have to read about a teacher anally raping one of her underage male students with a strap-on. When I got to that section, I was in a subway car. My horror was clearly showing, because when I looked up from the book, a girl nearby was laughing at me. Or maybe that was because I had forgotten to put on pants again. Whatever the reason, I blame Vidal.
Jumping back,
Myra Breckinridge is the journal of the titular, Hollywood-obsessed character who travels to LA to get her late husband’s inheritance money out of his pervy uncle, Buck Loner. Her late husband Myron Breckinridge. Myra and Myron. How coincidental!
Buck Loner runs an academy for aspiring actors, and he does not feel like turning over a chunk of its value to some hot widow he’s never heard of. Especially since Buck always thought Myron was gay. Myra has somewhat of a forceful personality, and she finagles a teaching job at the academy while they’re waiting for the lawyers to find Myron and Myra’s wedding certificate. The one that doesn’t exist, because Myra and her bought-off therapist claim they were hitched in Mexico, and as we all know from Rush Limbaugh and Carlos Mencia, Mexicans cannot be trusted to keep track of things like “marriage certificates” and “birth control” and "where their jokes came from.”
[Sidebar: The therapist’s full name is Dr. Randolph
Spenser Montag. IT’S SPEIDI, RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! It shouldn’t surprise me that I was reminded of Spencer and Heidi in a book about anal rape, since they have anally raped America’s collective soul. It pleases me to no end to find out that Spencer doesn’t have his own Wikipedia page, though. It must haunt him every night, as he grins creepily over Heidi’s sleeping body, lit only by the clown nightlight he insists on keeping.]
As a teacher, Myra sets about systematically degrading and sexually humiliating Rusty, one of her students, as revenge for all the men who fucked Myron up the ass. Literally. At the same time, she buddies up to his girlfriend, Mary Ann, who only came to the academy for a tour. Lasting three hours. On a boat. Anyhoodle, Myra finally breaks Rusty after the aforementioned anal rape and sends him into the open, masochistic arms of Leticia van Allen, agent to the stars. Equipped only with a coconut radio and dynamite made out of sand, the professor and Letitia conspire to keep Rusty and Mary Ann apart. Letitia wants Rusty’s underage, newly sadistic weiner all to herself, and Myra wants Mary Ann’s underage tunnel to everything pure and holy and feminine.
Myra’s success in that area is temporarily offset by the lawyers’ findings that Myron never died- his will leaving everything to Myra now can't be executed. So Myra does what any classy transsexual would do. She hikes up her skirt, pulls down her panties, and shows the world the scars that killed Myron (“decapitated” him, heehee) and birthed Myra. Buck is too grossed out to argue anymore, so Myra gets her money and buys a house for her and Mary Ann.
This is when the book goes even more off the rails, if that’s possible. Myra wakes up in the hospital, after being the victim of a hit and run (in her own driveway, hmm), with people calling her Myron. And without her boobies. And with a beard. And with a paranoia that the doctor, the nurse, the entire hospital is a giant ruse perpetrated by... the CIA? Where the hell did that come from? We never find out, but we do see a sexually satisfied Leticia with a broken everything after Rusty threw her down the stairs at the height of her orgasm.
Perhaps the most bizarre revelations emerge in the last three pages, when the journal’s author finds it in his attic years later and is shocked at how “demented” he, Myron, used to be. Now he lives a normal life married to Mary Ann, they’re Christian Scientists who sing, write, and work with Planned Parenthood, Leticia’s their agent, Rusty is a successful gay actor, Buck Loner and his academy are fine, Dr. Speidi is fine. Everyone’s… fine. That is not what I was expecting, and it's kind of a let-down.
Would I recommend Gore Vidal? Sure. (Read
Duluth!) Would I recommend
Myra Breckinridge? Doubtful, unless you’re a twisted fuck.
Pages: 212
(I finished Monkey Girl a few days ago, just haven't been able to finish the review yet. That's book #2.)
The blond is my fisherman friend Carp, holding a carp. I'm wearing a pretty pink bow and no shirt. You may laugh at a doodle getting banned, but I understand their decision-look at the wiener on that fish! Also, excessive violence: I had clearly just gotten through savagely chopping off Carp's hands in a fit of mad scientist, with the goal of seeing how viable fused carp-hands would be. (Answer: not very, unless you're hungry for fish that tastes vaguely of human.)
