Okay, I'm on S01E03......thoughts....

It isn't enough for Mailer that people enjoyed her; he cranks her up as great and an "angel of sex" and, yes, "Napoleonic was her capture of the attention of the world." Monroe the movie star with sexual clout overpowers Norman Mailer. But most of her late pictures (such as "The Prince and the Showgirl," "Let's Make Love" and "The Misfits") didn't capture the public. Audiences didn't want the nervous, soulful Monroe--never so dim as when she was being "luminous"; they wanted her to be a mock-dumb snuggly blonde and to have some snap. When Mailer writes about her "artist's intelligence" and "superb taste" and about the sort of work she did in "The Misfits" as "the fulfillment of her art," he just seems to be getting carried away by the importance of his subject. Back in 1962, he wrote that "she was bad in 'The Misfits,' she was finally too vague, and when emotion showed, it was unattractive and small," and he was right. It was already the Marilyn legend in that role--the baffled, vulnerable child-woman; she didn't have the double-edged defenselessness of her comedy hits, she looked unawakened yet sick--anguished.

But Mailer understands how Hollywood uses its starlets and how Marilyn Monroe the star might have reacted to that usage, and that is the key understanding that most commentators on her have lacked (though Clifford Odets's obit of her had it, also the story Ezra Goodman wrote for Time in 1956, which Time didn't print but which appears in his "The Fifty Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood"). And who but Norman Mailer could have provided the analysis (that starts on page 35, the real beginning of the book) of the effect on Monroe of the torpor of her 21 months in an orphanage and why it probably confirmed her into a liar and reinforced "everything in her character that was secretive"? And who else, writing about a Pop figure, would even have thought about the relation of narcissism to institutional care? His strength--when he gets rolling--isn't in Freudian guesses but in his fusing his knowledge of how people behave with his worst suspicions of where they really live.

His best stuff derives from his having been on the scene, or close enough to smell it out. When it comes to reporting the way American rituals and institutions operate, Mailer's low cunning is maybe the best tool anyone ever had. He grasps the psychological and sexual rewards the studio system offered executives. He can describe why Zanuck, who had Monroe under contract, didn't like her; how she became "a protagonist in the great American soap opera" when her nude calendar was "discovered"--i.e. leaked to the press by Jerry Walk to publicize "Clash by Night"; and what it may have meant to her to date DiMaggio, "an American king--her first. The others have been merely Hollywood kings." He's elegantly cogent on the Method and his paragraphs on Lee Strasberg as a critic of acting are a classic.

About half of "Marilyn" is great as only a great writer using his brains and feelers could make it. Just when you get fed up with his flab and slop, he'll come through with a runaway string of perceptions and you have to recognize that, though it's a bumpy ride, the book still goes like a streak. His writing is close to the pleasures of movies; his immediacy makes him more accessible to those brought up with the media than, say, Bellow. You read him with a heightened consciousness because his performance has zing. It's the star system in literature; you can feel him bucking for the big time, and when he starts flying it's so exhilarating you want to applaud. But it's a good-bad book. When Mailer tries to elevate his intuitions into theories, the result is usually verbiage. (His theory that men impart their substance and qualities into women along with their semen is a typical macho Mailerism; he sees it as a one-way process, of course. Has no woman slipped a little something onto his privates?) There are countless bits of literary diddling: "--she had been alive for twenty years but not yet named!--"; the exclamation points are like sprinkles, Mailer the soothsayer with his rheumy metaphysics and huckster's magick is a carny quack, and this Hollywood milieu seems to bring out his fondness for the slacker reaches of the occult--reincarnation and sob-sister omens. ("A bowl of tomato sauce dropped on her groom's white jacket the day of her first wedding.") We know his act already and those words (dread, existential, ontology, the imperatives) that he pours on like wella balsam to tone up the prose. And there's his familiar invocation of God, i.e. mystery. But it's less mysterious now because it has become a weapon: the club he holds over the villain of the book--respectable, agnostic Arthur Miller, a writer of Mailer's own generation (and closer than that) who won Marilyn Monroe. Set a thief to catch a thief, an artist on an artist, and one nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn on another.

It's not just a book about Monroe, it's Mailer's show. "Feedback has become the condition of our lives," he said in an interview in 1972. "It's the movies. We've passed the point in civilization where we can ever look at anything as an art work. There is always our knowledge of it and of the making of it." Whether true or false, this applies to Mailer, and he has made us more aware than we may want to be of his titles and campaigns, his aspiration to be more than a writer, to conquer the media and be monarch of American arts--a straight Jean Cocteau who'd meet anybody at high noon: Something has been withheld from Norman Mailer: his crown lacks a few jewels, a star. He has never triumphed in the theater, never been looked up to as a Jewish Lincoln, and never been married to a famous movie queen--a sex symbol. (He's also not a funny writer; to be funny you have to be totally unfettered, and he's too ambitious.) Mailer's waddle and crouch may look like a put-on, but he means it when he butts heads. "Marilyn" is his whammy to Arthur Miller.

In 1967, in an article written to promote the off-Broadway version of "The Deer Park," Mailer said of himself, "There were too many years when he dreamed of 'The Deer Park' on Broadway and the greatest first night of the decade, too many hours of rage when he declaimed to himself that his play was as good as 'Death of a Salesman,' or even, and here he gulped hard, 'A Streetcar Named Desire.'" The sly sonuvabitch coveted Miller's success and cut him down in the same sentence. ("The Deer Park" wasn't Mailer's "Salesman"; based on Mailer's own second marriage and dealing with integrity and the McCarthy period and sex and love, it was more like Mailer's "After the Fall.") In his warm-up in "Marilyn" Mailer points out that though he'd never met Marilyn Monroe, she had for a time lived with Miller in Connecticut "not five miles away from the younger author, who [was] not yet aware of what his final relation to Marilyn Monroe would be. . . . " It appears to be destiny's decree that he should take her over. Mailer isn't the protagonist of this book; Marilyn is. But Mailer and God are waiting in the wings.

How can we readers limit ourselves to the subject when he offers us this name-play: "it was fair to engraved coincidence that the letters in Marilyn Monroe" (if the 'a' were used twice and 'o' but once) would spell his own name leaving only the 'y' for excess, a trifling discrepancy, no more calculated to upset the heavens than the most minuscule diffraction of the red shift"? (What would happen to any other serious writer trying to foist his giddy acrostics on us?) He fails to record that both Miller and Mailer probably derive from M”hler. Siblings. He had said in "The Armies of the Night" that he dreaded winding up "the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn," that that was the one personality he considered "absolutely insupportable," but it was clearly a love-hate game--or why dread it? Actually he's in no danger. He's cut off from respectability, like our country; the greatest American writer is a bum, and a bum who's starting not to mind it. The time to begin worrying is when both he and the U.S. start finding virtues in this condition; we could all wind up like drunks doing a music-hall turn.

He can't get Arthur Miller's long bones, but he's busy trying to take off his skin; he wouldn't do it to Robert Lowell. But Miller and Mailer try for the same things; he's catching Miller's hand in the gentile cookie jar. Mailer doesn't get into confessional self-analysis on Miller as he did with Lowell; he writes as if with lordly objectivity--but the reader can feel what's going on. He says Millers' possible fear of the marriage's failing, "a man who has lost confidence in his creative power sees ridicule as the broom that can sweep him to extinction" and then proceeds to make every kind of fool of him, attributing to him the impulses and motives that Mailer considers most contemptible. Ultimately what he's saying is that Miller wasn't smart enough to get any more out of Monroe than "After the Fall." With Mailer, if you're going to use, use big. The second half of the book is supremely cruel to Miller--and it infects and destroys one's pleasure in the good parts. The "novel biography" becomes Mailer's way to perform character assassination with the freedom of a novelist who has created fictional characters. He's so cold-blooded in imputing motives to others that he can say of Yves Montand, for example, that Marilyn Monroe was "his best ticket to notoriety." Is this how Mailer maneuvers--is Marilyn Monroe Norman Mailer's sure-fire subject after a few box- office flops? Is that why he shoots the works in his final orgies of gossipy conjecture and turns her death into another Chappaquiddick--safe in the knowledge no one is left to call him a liar?

He uses his gifts meanly this time--and that's not what we expect of Mailer, who is always billed as generous. This brilliant book gives off bad vibes--and vibes are what Mailer is supposed to be the master of. "Marilyn" is a feat all right: matchstick by matchstick, he's built a whole damned armada inside a bottle. (Surely he's getting ready to do "Norman"? Why leave it to someone who may care less?) But can we honor him for this book when it doesn't sit well on the stomach? It's a metaphysical cocktail-table book, and probably not many will be able to resist looking for the vicious digs and the wrap-up on the accumulated apocrypha of many years, many parties. To be king of the bums isn't really much. What are we actually getting out of "Marilyn"? Good as the best parts of it are, there's also malevolence that needs to be recognized. Is the great reporter's arrogance so limitless that he now feels free to report on matters to which he's never been exposed? Neither the world nor Marilyn Monroe's life should be seen in Norman Mailer's image.

Pauline Kael is a movie critic for The New Yorker and author, most recently, of "Deeper Into Movies."