Myra Lives!

By R.Z.S.

MYRON by GOREVIDAL 244 pages. Random House. $6.95.

Fans of Myra Breckinridge--that beautiful, transsexual, all-American succubus--will recall that she was last seen in a hospital bed after having the silicon knocked out of her by a hit-and-run driver. To save her life, Dr. Mengers rebuilt and re-endowed her as Myron Breckinridge: the man, in fact, who Myra had originally been before a sex-change operation transformed him into a her. Though the doctor fashioned a generous "rehnquist" for the new Myron, he did not provide him with a set of "powells."

Renaming the nether parts of his characters after the Supreme Court Justices who voted to allow communities to set their own pornography standards is one of Gore Vidal's gentler touches in Book II of the Breckinridge saga. It is an invidiously amusing camp fantasy which seems to have been inspired in equal parts by Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and Claude Rains' Mr. Jordan movies.

The new Myron is a staid and politically conservative Southern Californian, a caterer of Chinese food, a dog fancier and the husband of the lovely Mary-Ann, whom Myra lusted after in Book I. Yet deep within Myron the old Myra lives on, awaiting the moment to reassert her evil nature -- or, as she likes to put it, to become "the Embodiment of Necessary Mutancy on the verge of creating a superrace, in my image."

The moment arrives one night when Myron is televiewing Siren of Babylon, a 1948 costume turkey starring Bruce Cabot and Maria Montez. As Myron ad justs his set, the imprisoned Myra shoves him through the screen, and he finds himself back in 1948 on the MGM set where the movie is being shot.

Drag Queen. It was a good year for Hollywood, and one of the best that a powerful, confident America has ever known. But Myron soon learns that his "new" world of padded shoulders and Hudson Hornets is divided into the locals -- those who are actually living and working on the film in 1948 -- and the visitors -- those like himself who were mysteriously dumped there. There are scores of visitors, including a Philadel phia cook named Whittaker Kaiser, who is a merciless lampoon of Norman Mailer at his most masculine pugnacious. Richard Nixon even puts in a brief appearance, wanting to know if there is an extradition treaty between 1948 and the future.

Under such conditions, Myra is periodically able to take full command of Myron's body. This gives the narrative a Jekyll and Hyde format, with Myra eventually upstaging Myron, who every one thinks is a drag queen. Still unsatisfied by her escapades in Book I, Myra resumes her humiliation of men, inflict ing yet another hilarious outrage upon a strapping, redheaded youth out of the Van Johnson mold. She also undertakes to save Hollywood, armed with the fore-knowlege of its decline and Vidal's grasp of the industry's "future" profit-and-loss sheets. She even has a warning for Judy Garland: "Get off the pills. If you don't, you'll be dead in 21 years."

Myra's own fate is to wind up in the body of Maria Montez -- unable to understand Spanish. With Myra foiled, a puzzled Myron returns to the rightful side of the TV screen. It must be seen as a victory of banality over evil -- at least temporarily.

Once again, Gore Vidal proves that in a market crowded with literary hook ers, he is a true courtesan. He respects the values of entertainment and can de liver a novel for practically any taste.

Last year's bestselling Burr is an excel lent example of the author's skill at packaging a bit of class in a good deal of excelsior. For Myron, he tricks out his peeves and hostilities with the malicious energy that has made him the best--if not the most original--of our hard-core satirists. Myra/Myron is the perfect mate for Vidal's cold-blooded gifts. If the caricatures, derision and raillery sometimes outpace the action--or the point --it is because even Vidal is not immune to the satirist's most common affliction:

premature expostulation. "R.Z.S.

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