RANSVESTIA

BOOK REVIEW

SPLENDORA

Review By: Carol Beecroft

SPLENDORA by Edward Swift

251 pages, clothbound, $8.95.

The courtyard in Splendora, Texas is an antique red brick building with gables and turrets and gothic windows and a four- faced clock, but all of this is encased in a jerry-built modern cover- up of three concrete blocks that rise in tiers like a blank wedding cake. And Timothy Coldridge, a one-time Splendora boy of legen- dary beauty who vanished with a "by-your-leave" some 15 years earlier, is at long last returning to Splendora, but he's returning as Miss Jessica Gatewood, a refined librarian of 33 who dresses in late Victorian style and wears her hair in a Gibson Girl topknot.

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What's real and what is not, and what has been forced into an unreal position because popular opinion has declared the reality unacceptable these are the subjects of Splendora. Timothy John, it emerges, has been driven to his disguise by a whole chorus of public opinion: the feminizing grandmother who thought he "ought to be a French bed doll," the schoolmates who made fun of him, the Splendora ladies who agreed he was "too pretty to be a boy," and the various, anonymous men whose catcalls followed him down the street before he finally, with some relief, fell into the role of Jessica Gatewood. Inside Miss Jessica's upright figure, then, he returns to Splendora and, like a whole army inside a Trojan horse, he takes the town by storm. Splendora is an unusual

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