Word: myra
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...Myra Breckinridge, Vidal...
FICTION 1. Myra Breckinridge, Vidal (1 last week...
Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge (TIME, Feb. 16) depicts a transvestite who tries to make it both as a man and as a woman, and winds up no woman at all and only half a man. Three other new novels share with Myra her/his/its preoccupation-or experimentation-with artificial sex. But unlike Myra, which is redeemed somewhat by Vidal's satirical skill, these books have the lifeless neutrality of assignments thought up by publishers' accountants and carried out by literary conscripts. They not only fail to exalt, amuse, enrage, inform, misinform or anesthetize; they also fall short...
...novel's subject matter has already produced advance sales of more than 40,000 copies. The thought has even occurred to Vidal that it could make a movie. "I showed Myra to Jane Fonda," he says. "She read it four times, and then said, I don't think I know how to play...
...idea produces a nice, satirical swing in Myra. An even wilder swing, about which Vidal may or may not be serious, is the image of Myra as the symbolic solution for the population explosion. "She is a kind of messiah," says Vidal. In other words, the remedy for overpopulation might be homosexuality...