One of the pitfalls of choosing a real person to be at the centre of a fiction - and a figure as famous, celebrated, beautiful, tragic and despised as Marilyn Monroe - is that so much of the novelist's work is a matter of deconstruction.
From the Andy Warhol lithographs of the actress to that famous poster image from The Seven Year Itch of her standing over a subway grating, her dress flaring and her underwear showing, to the slurry rendition of the birthday song to President Kennedy, there have been so many images of Marilyn projected on to the public consciousness that Oates's job as a novelist - to create a newly minted Marilyn Monroe - is next nigh impossible.
It is not the first time that Oates has strayed into the arena of what is unflatteringly called faction, but should be more accurately described as fictography (or should that be biofiction?). Black Water (1992), a novelistic meditation on the last hours of a young woman much like Mary Jo Kopechne, before she plunged to her death in a river in the back seat of a car belonging to a senator much like Ted Kennedy, was a tour de force of the genre. A slim bullet of a book, it managed to monumentalise the pathos and innocence of the 26-year-old campaign worker without sentimentalising her experience.
Blonde is a different kettle of fish. No one could accuse it of slightness. It is a doorstop of a book, all 738 pages of it. And at one level, every page of it is necessary. For to get inside Marilyn Monroe, to tell that story from the inside out, the reader needs to be literally steeped in the childish consciousness that seems to have informed much of the "real" woman's experience. I use the quotation marks advisedly.
For Oates is not in the business of reinterpreting a myth. The Norma Jeane Baker (Marilyn's given name) she creates can only be judged on fictional terms, not on whether it fits in with the reader's perceptions of who Marilyn Monroe was. And no reader will come to this book without preconceptions. Norma Jeane Baker's metamorphosis from white trailer trash to sexual icon is so much the stuff of populist myth, now generically familiar, even if we aren't familiar with the specific details.
For me the most compelling parts of this novel were the early chapters, precisely because it was less ploughed-over territory. The pretty six-year-old Norma Jeane living in shared lodgings in Hollywood with her deeply unstable mother, Gladys Mortensen, who works as a laboratory assistant with The Studio.
Gladys is an extraordinary creation, her chilly distance and spiteful cruelty as a mother successfully cloaked behind a frivolous gaiety, and jealously guarded ambitions for herself. She constantly taunts the child with a photograph of a man whom she says is Norma Jeane's father who left before the child was born. She promises that this man, a celebrity in Hollywood, will some day come to claim her. It is a fixation that colours the rest of Norma Jeane's existence - her love affairs with older men and her frail, childish submission to the authority of all men.
When her mother is carted off to a lunatic asylum, having attempted to kill Norma Jeane by placing her in a scalding hot bath, she is sent to an orphanage. Here a life of humiliating institutional cruelties and the influence of Christian Science endorses her desperate need to please and the puritanical hatred of her own body. A foster home follows where her sexual blossoming leads her foster mother to marry her off because she fears her husband has designs on the 16-year-old beauty.
Perhaps the most heartbreaking sections of the book are the descriptions of this early doomed marriage to embalmer's assistant, Buddy Glazer. The teenage war bride earnestly playing wifey, cooking and cleaning, and eventually ending up in war work where the first photographs of her are taken as a propaganda pin-up. And, as they say, the rest is history.
This Norma Jeane whom Oates so piercingly creates - a naive, anxious teenager, at war with her own body but acutely aware of its powerful attraction, a girl imbued with a punishing religious sensibility, hungry for education, greedy for appraisal - is a captivating fictional creation. The reader can see clearly how easily this Norma Jeane would have been easy prey for the manipulation of Hollywood moguls with her strange mix of submissive beauty and sexual precocity.
Perhaps Oates would have been better to leave Norma Jeane there at that point, because in a strange way the rest of the story, as Oates painstakingly tells it, drains away the dreamy power of this character, as more and more accretions and other identities are piled on to her and she collapses beneath their weight.
That said, this is a deeply complex book, its internal imagery shot through with an actorly consciousness, the swift documentary style interspersed with a Greek chorus of other voices - from Hollywood wives to ex-lovers, from Joe diMaggio to Arthur Miller, from foster mother to FBI spook - as well, of course, as the timid trail of Norma Jeane's own hidden voice, which though fractured and compromised stays true right to the very end of this ambitious work.
Mary Morrissy's most recent novel, The Pretender, was published earlier this year by Jonathan Cape