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Dear Mr. Blue
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And indeed, hummingbirds dart through the pages of "Blonde" like tiny emblems of the imperceptible. Joyce Carol Oates' scary and rhapsodic novel about the life of Marilyn Monroe is saturated with the mysteries of eye and camera -- time, motion and stasis, light and dark -- as well as the mystery of Monroe's presence on-screen.

Blonde By Joyce Carol Oates The Ecco Press, 738 pages Fiction

The still camera was always Monroe's friend. But perhaps because she understood it so well, the motion picture camera terrified her. Moviemaking was an agony for her and became so for everybody she worked with. She'd hide in her dressing room for hours: The love scene in "Some Like It Hot" required 51 takes; one conversation in "Bus Stop" took six days to film. And yet the directness and naturalness she achieved during these harrowing sessions consistently astonished everyone who'd been on the set.

On-screen she looks startled, as though she's so entirely present in the moment and in her glowing skin that she has lost track of the plot. Director Billy Wilder said she had "flesh impact," her flesh "warm and alive even in black and white." She hugs herself, wiggles her shoulders with the pleasure of inhabiting her body. The physical world is friendly, hospitable; even the air -- from the subway grating, the air conditioner -- makes love to her.

How did a perpetually frightened and insecure young woman summon up such powers of illusion? Out of what fathomless need did an illegitimate child who spent years in foster homes command so much attention and so much love, even 40 years after her death? How, out of a series of doomed affairs and marriages and some not-very-good scripts, did she manage to tell us so much about sex? And what kept her from ever satisfying her own needs for love and respect?

Oates presents her story as a tale of the grotesque, a horror story akin to Stephen King's "Carrie," another book about an unhappy child with a mad mother. Like most horror stories, "Blonde" is a tale of freakish overcompensation, impossible wishes granted, awesome power ill-used, demons finally undefeated -- the story of an injured child who can't be healed, even by the love of the millions. There's nothing supernatural in it, of course, unless you consider the immense sway that movie images and technology hold over all our imaginations.

Unlike genre horror fiction, though, "Blonde" is a huge, incantatory, expressionistic work that doubles back on itself to retell stories again and again, building its themes and variations through a seeming infinity of retakes. Description approaches hallucination. The action is told by numerous voices, some singular and famous, some anonymous and plural. Sometimes the narrative voice is breathless, almost gasping -- the ghostly Marilyn Monroe voice, oddly formal and well mannered, too high and thin for the body that produced it.

The childhood scenes in "Blonde" are pure irresistible Grand Guignol. In Oates' telling, Monroe's mother, Gladys Mortensen (also spelled Mortenson), is a frenzied, furious, star-stuck studio employee, fuming and quivering on the verge of psychic meltdown. Volatile, delusional, chain-smoking and sometimes setting the sheets on fire, she delivers endless apocalyptic rants based on serendipitous reading and a thousand movies. The reader (and little Norma Jeane, aka Norma Jean, as well) become transfixed, especially as Mortensen tells the terrified and adoring child on her sixth birthday that her father has promised to return and "claim" her.

He never does, of course, though Monroe waits all her life and calls all her husbands "Daddy." Or, more ominously, he's there all the time, in the movie reality at the back of her mind that always threatens to overwhelm her grip on everyday events.

Hyperreal and overwrought, the book stuns by its relentless energy. The most effective scenes (besides the opening ones of Mortensen) are the most brutally expressionist: the shooting of the famous nude calendar, the casual sadism of the studio heads, the icy cruelty of Kennedy and company. Less successful, I think, is a hokey, probably manufactured central episode having to do with Monroe's obscure affair with a sad, sexy, druggy Charles Chaplin Jr.

Next page | Making sex seem as simple as ice cream