Myron is not as good as Myra Breckinridge for two reasons. Firstly, it's more about Myra and her attempts from Myron, and secondly, the second joke is rarely better than the first, especially when your first sally is as good as Myra Breckinridge. That said, Vidal upends expectations. We assume Myron is a prequel but it is actually a sequel. The original pre-Myra Myron was a cinema geek, an intellectual, whereas this Myron, following Myra's car crash and surgery is a dull-as-ditchwater middleclass Californian in the Chinese Food business. Time, of course, has moved on and we find ourselves in 1973 at the height of the Watergate scandal. Myron, meanwhile, finds himself (with a stroke of Swiftian brio) stuck on the set of the MGM movie Siren of Babylon in the summer of 1948. Here, it is always the summer of 1948. When the movie finishes shooting, they simply start shooting again. Out-of-towners like Myron, who have somehow time-slipped here, stay at the Thalberg Hotel, largely unnoticed by the locals. When they try and speak of their situation, it comes out as meaningless gibberish.
In these circumstances Myra, deeply and firmly supressed by Myron, starts to re-emerge. Being herself a made-up character she registers better with the locals. Among the out-of-towners at the Thalberg is Maude, a gay hairdressers with a sideline in drag, who helps Myra regain her looks. Myra makes it her mission to save MGM, to make transgender eunuchs ubiquitous and thus prevent overpopulation and the various geopolitical crises which she knows will make the western world the ghastly place it is in 1973.
Chaos and further slippages ensue. It is all great fun but cannot quite equal the gobsmacking transgression that was Breckinridge.
