a grammar

natashavc:

Though he had published the initial Monroe appreciation with plenty of now strange-reading, and occasionally sloppy, references to Nixon and the “Silent Majority,” Mailer was still, aesthetically speaking, a creature from his New York–in-the-’50s milieu. And so he treats his subject the way any modernist writer or artist would: by obliterating it. Mailer explodes Marilyn with the intensity of his own desires and fascination; he emolliates her, describing Monroe as sugar, honey, ice cream, and chocolate in the opening chapter. He swishes Monroe’s history in his mouth, ingests her, hides her in his bowels, then vomits her out. It is up to us to interpret the meaning of Mailer’s big splatters and streaks. You step back from the text of Marilyn, and it’s like you’ve been looking at a towering Rothko or Pollock; you’re haunted. The book gives the impression that you, through this dramatic exercise, know about Marilyn Monroe. Is it all The Truth? No, and Mailer is uninterested in Truth—so the joke’s on us if we’d come to this performance-art piece in search of facts.

Goldfinger: Norman Mailer gives a gilded, forensic tour of all things Marilyn by Natasha Vargas-Cooper for Bookforum