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I have conflicting emotions about this book, and it goes something like this, “The book is about Marilyn, so what is there NOT to like about it, right? Warts and all, it is a powerful book written by a powerful writer.�� But the song that keeps playing in my head, the words that keep haunting me, comes from the voice of another writer, This is the story of a rape.

��This is the story of a rape, of the events that led up to it and followed it and of the place in which it happened. There are the action, the people and the place; all of which are interrelated but in their totality incommunicable in isolation from the moral continuum of human affairs.�� (Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown.)

There is something so ugly and disturbing about Joyce Carol Oates’s interpretation of Marilyn’s life that if one were to take away the author’s name, one would suspect it was written by a loathsome mysogynist, hell-bent on destroying every last vestige of humanity in Marilyn Monroe, movie-queen, and Norma Jeane Baker, innocent dreamer.

I fell into a trance in the first few hundred pages, falling subject to Norma Jeane’s unquenchable spirit. Even tossed about by the vagaries of her early years, the reader sees how Norma Jeane was destined for some kind of greatness. She was an indefatigable optimist; a resilient life force that did battle with her mother’s depression and burgeoning insanity, and from under which she sprang out stronger still. It was only later, after the little fighter had grown into a vibrant woman who had been knocked down one too many times that the inherited depression finally consumed her and dragged her into hell. In the intervening years she fought -- and fought like hell -- to hang onto the dream of “getting out alive�� and making something of her life. The reader can’t help but feel an overwhelming sadness, and fatalism, because unlike the young Norma Jeane, we know how the story ends.

So far, so good, despite its all-consuming sadness.

Then, Oates’s fangs come out. She reveals to us her secret loathing for Marilyn, sub-consciously played out in the voice of the men who hated The Blonde Actress: cow, cunt, stupid cunt, mammalian bitch, tramp, slut, WHORE, sucker of cocks, depressed whacko bitch, stupid cunt, stupid cunt, stupid cunt. OK, we hear you. But that’s the point: I don’t hear the voice of the men so much as I hear Oates’s voice in my head: you whore, you bitch, you cunt. The sub-text screams to me so loudly, it’s like a punch in the face by Oates, every slander uttered.

This is nothing but a vile peep show, it occurred to me half way through the novel. Here I am, engaging in the tearing down of the movie-queen, complicit in the act of rape. No one is forcing me to read this book, just like no one forced Oates to write it.

The voyeuristic quality is enhanced by the protracted use of the third person: The Blonde Actress, The Ex-Athlete, The Playwright, The President. We, the readers, are standing in the red light district, leering into the dimly-lit and dirty window where the young woman lies exposed and vulnerable. No one looks away, either out of decency or revulsion. A human being is being torn apart, and we continue to be complicit in her excoriation.

You won’t write about me, will you, Daddy? You won’t write about me, will you? You won’t write about me?

Knowing this -- knowing how much Norma Jeane abhorred being written about in her Marilyn persona -- Oates revels in ignoring her plea. Like the paparazzi who swoop like carrion birds, she licks up every last intimate detail and splatters it luridly for our consumption.

Disturbingly, Oates seems even more obsessed with Marilyn’s body than the raving fans: dwelling, obsessively, on skin and excretions and secretions, ad nauseam. She is pre-occupied with Marilyn’s sexual intimacies and her miscarriages and her womb. She is so consumed by Marilyn’s womb, in fact, that she leaves us with the notion she believes all Marilyn ever was, was a big gaping receptacle of vileness, hungry for as much degradation as she could possibly contain. Over and over again, we hear stupid cunt, hailed as the avenue to the stinking, infertile receptacle. Marilyn’s womb did not bear fruit, after all -- it was simply another secreting, foul failure of our movie-queen.

��I’m always running into people’s unconscious.�� Those words, prophetically spoken by Marilyn Monroe in her empty-headed persona, shine quite a light on this fictional biography. Oates seems to have run smack into the middle of her own “unconscious�� while trying to explore Marilyn’s.

As much as art can be an exploratory medium to expose the vileness of the world and act as a cathartic force for change, just as often it reveals the vileness or the victim within. It often uncovers our own hidden truths and reveals to us our own failings. When confronted with ourselves, it thus becomes easy to say “this is just art�� when we really should be admitting “this is me.��

As much as this was an authoritative book then, it was an equally forceful indictment of the things that should not be said. Certain secrets should not be violated. Add to that, there are some books that should never have been written, despite the truths they hold. This is one of them.

So many will disagree -- because it was written by an influential writer, and it’s art.