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After such a prepublication success story, the book's merits and flaws almost seem beside the point. There are brilliant passages, of course. Every book by Mailer is, in a sense, a trip with Virgil through the underground. Norman is a first-class infernist; in Marilyn he explores the violent desperation of small-town American life and finds it far more like Winesburg, Ohio than Our Town. He analyzes the malignant asylum of Hollywood−as he did in The Deer Park, one of the best noveis ever written about that town. In the rectilinear powerhouse of New York City, he finds himself truly at home. Yet overall, Marilyn runs a subnorman temperature.
In Marilyn's first chapter, the writer coins a word, factoids−facts that have no existence before publication. Let his own factoid-filled volume be known as a "biographoid"−an occasionally brilliant book marred by speculation, literary swagger and chrome-yellow journalism. Mailer never met Monroe, and despite his professed affinities, he can do little more than guesswork. For every intuitive leap he suffers ten existential pratfalls.
Mailer speaks of his subject's "karmic" qualities but only offers the inadmissible evidence of hearsay and conjecture. He can sometimes sum up an epoch in a phrase−as in his description of Monroe's cinema personality during the years of the DiMaggio marriage. On screen, "something as hard and blank as a New York Yankee out for a share of the spoils is now in her expression." Yet he can be as gaseous as a press agent. "Small wonder the back seat of her car looks like a crash pad," he writes. "She is an animal who needs the funky familiar of her lair." Evidently, Mailer has not been in the back seat of any family station wagons lately.
In his portrait of this ineluctable "castrator-queen," Mailer defines the essence of the star: "She was never for TV ... she was one of the last of cinema's aristocrats and may not have wanted to be examined, then ingested, in the neighborly reductive dimensions of America's living room. No, she belonged to the occult church of the film, and the last covens of Hollywood." But just as often, he can suggest Louella Parsons at her coyest: "Soon Sinatra will give her a white poodle which she calls 'Maf,' for she is forever teasing Sinatra about his connections."
Beyond Sex. Even Mailer's humor seems as heavy as the book itself: "The letters in Marilyn Monroe (if the "a" were used twice and the "o" but once) would spell his own name, leaving only the "y" for excess." Indeed so, and the letters in Norman Mailer are an anagram of "Nil, O rare man" with an M left over for Marilyn, Mailer or just plain moonshine.