A Truly American Story - "Misfit" by Adam Braver
Adam Braver's Misfit manages to be a novel that is entirely about Marilyn Monroe while appealing far beyond any crass celebrity story type moniker. I came to it primarily because it is published by Tinhouse and after being quite gobsmacked by my love for Alexis Smith's Glaciers I really want to give something else by them a try. It helps that I have a certain affection for Monroe's work and also find her a Hollywood tragedy that seems to me is far more about being a woman of her time then a victim of the rich and famous. But none of that matters really because the moment I picked Misfit up and started reading it became a novel I could not put down and am still thinking about.
A lot of people have written about Marilyn Monroe but you need to set all of that aside when picking up Misfit. Braver frames the book around the last weekend of her life, when she traveled with Peter Lawford and Pat Kennedy to Frank Sinatra's resort up on Lake Tahoe. It's about her attempt to get away from an enormous amount of professional and personal stress and her deeply felt desire to rest.
The facts of the trip are true, the feelings expressed by Monroe are, of course, fiction. At Sinatra's lodge she fell to pieces and because everyone by then expected nothing less of her than that, no one thought to save her. She went home and she died. Whether the Lawfords or Sinatra wished they had done something more, whether any of them could have done something more, is really irrelevant. Braver is not looking to cast blame here. What he wants is to show how complicated this woman was, how little anyone truly knew her and how desperate she was to be free of....herself. In that respect she was so much like so many woman from her era that I have known that I quite forgot I was reading about a movie star. Sinatra could have been anyone, her friends represent everyone, Monroe's position could have been anything, her spouses were just like so many other husbands of their time. Misfit is about the woman we knew so little, not the famous star and even though Clark Gable and Dean Martin and so many other famous people are here, it is the sheer normal-ness of all their actions and reactions that will strike you deep and hard.
Braver moves back and forth in time, always returning to the lodge and that last weekend. He gives readers some of Monroe's tragic childhood, her discovery on an assembly line, her marriages and her serious study of acting. A lot of the book is taken with her role in the film Misfits (with Gable) and her final role in the unfinished film Something's Got To Give (with Martin). He gives readers a full picture of a complicated person but mostly he just shows you how damn hard it could be to be a woman, let alone a famous and talented one, in the 1950s. After reading Misfit it's clear to me that Marilyn Monroe really never had a damn chance and I hate that. But wow, do I ever love how Braver made me realize that truth and how incredibly beautiful his way of imparting it was.
I love this book; can't wait to read another one (Karen Shepherd's The Celestials is due out in June) from Tinhouse.
Monroe on the set of Somethings Got To Give.
