MYRA BRECKINRIDGE, by Gore Vidal. Little, Brown and Co., Boston and Toronto, 264 pp. $5.95 Hardcover, just available in paperback at about $1.00. (1968)

The big mystery about this book is what made the general public run it up to best-seller status. It is simply impossible for me to read it from their viewpoint, as I (and everyone I've talked with about it) knows far more about the subject than the author, and so have non-typical reactions (mostly bad ones). It is not particularly "dirty" by current standards (see below), and is not a very good story plot-wise. It may be the reaction to finding the narrator, who at the start appears to be merely an attractive young woman with rather strange fantasies, gradually revealing herself as less and less feminine. I suppose the general reader goes stepwise from "strange girl" through "Lesbian", and feels teased along as to what is beyond THAT. The mystery is at last revealed: Myra is her "brother" Myron, who apparently was a flaming drag-queen or at least swishy homosexual, converted by the transsexual operation and posing as his widow. The tawdry plot involves no more than her battle to wrest his inheritance from her slippery uncle, who runs a low-grade acting school in Los Angeles, and would last for only a few pages if not inflated by. Myra's increasingly masculine behavior.

For dirty, we have but three scenes: an orgastic party at which Myra is more observer than participant; the BIG scene (tiresomely prolonged) is in which Myra rapes the boy-friend of the girl she has fallen in love with; and a second-hand account of his subsequent sadistic treatment of a masochistic woman gossip-columnist, to prove what a woman-hater Myra has made of a formerly gentle lover. Plus, of course, casual reminisences of Myron's homosexual experiences, and hints of the odd sex practices of her uncle. Really, just a light seasoning by 1968 standards; see your neighborhood candy store for the hard-core pornography!

My feeling was that the book had little to offer the TVia reader, and most of my TV friends who have tried it agree. The portrayal may well be accurate in the sense that this is what a "converted" drag-queen would be like; my limited knowledge of them makes this plausible. It is NOTHING like the TSs I have