The Missing Person
McCarthy, Abigail
A misery of their own THE MISSING PERSON Doris Grumbach Putnam's, $11.95, 252 pp. Abigail McCarthy DORIS Grumbachs new novel has a queer timeliness in the context of recent events. It explores...
...Franny Fuller is a Marilyn Monroe-like sex goddess of the screen...
...In real life she was an unloved waif of a child, early and brutally introduced to sex, and to what her beautiful face and body could bring her...
...The creatures of the Hollywood process she gives us, men as well as women, are all victims...
...Well, I'll tell you a funny thing...
...Peculiar to our technological times, it seems, are the unfinished and damaged people who substitute shadows for reality, who live in their dreams with the synthetic stars of the electronic media...
...In the end she is mythic: "What of her...
...And like a well-made British film, its bit-players provide its brightest spots and are unforgettable...
...It is thus hard for her to have a separate imaginary existence in the mind of the reader...
...But this flaw, if it is one, is more than compensated for by the writer's evocation of the scene against which Franny moves-tawdry, wonderful Hollywood at its peak...
...There seems evidence in the prefatory note that Doris Grumbach may initially have thought of Franny Fuller's story as a feminist statement in that women like Franny whom America "glorifies and elevates" are sex objects made larger than life...
...She moves toward them, then retreats, perched precariously on the swing of the unbearable present...
...Their dreams can explode: a John Hinckley obsessed with a starlet shoots a president...
...It is a world in which the objects of fantasy are as unreal as the dreams woven around them...
...To see it...
...Even the succession of husbands-first the baseball player, then the poet...
...But when I saw it, all that curvy pink flesh of mine, it was reassuring...
...She is only sure of the physical self through which she becomes an incandescent image on the screen...
...But most sympathetic of all is Willis Lord-marvelously conceived and limned in deft strokes-the silent film star who was destroyed by the coming of sound...
...The butter, then the eggs...
...With your right hand, so you won't interfere with the camera...
...Everybody thinks I minded that picture of me in the nothing on those cards everybody bought...
...Willis would act as he was instructed to . . . This day, and every other day of his life was being filmed, edited, the film spliced, pieced, canned, and shelved for eternity...
...It was printed at a time like this, when I thought I'd lost myself and maybe my mind...
...In her, the intimations of immortality are strong...
...There are times when Franny cannot work, times when she disappears for weeks on end in mid-picture, wreaking havoc for her studio and her fellow performers...
...he attributed these transitions to the price she had to pay for being forced to embody in public all the yearnings of a daydreaming soci-ety.' Franny has strange terrors, she fears being alone, yet retreats from those who come near...
...The Missing Person is the story of a movie star-a portrait, the author tells us, "not of a single life but of many lives melded into one, typical of the women America often glorifies and elevates, and then leaves suspended in their lonely and destructive fame...
...There is Franny's last co-star...
...I didn't...
...It explores the world in which the manufacture of mass-produced fantasy and dream had its genesis-that of the motion picture...
...In Grumbach's hands Franny's aching emptiness is strangely endearing...
...That was what I was, who I was, and it was good to know about it...
...But if so, as often happens in the creative process, she has transcended that aim in the writing...
...Perhaps the character Franny could bear the weight of this symbolic significance better if the facts of her life were not so close to those of the real Marilyn...
...He feared being halted on his way up by sympathy for anyone but Brock Currier of Beverly Hills, born Aaron Feldstein of Chicago, a boy-self buried so deep now that he rarely remembered it had ever existed...
...The reader can understand the succession of lovers who try to ease it and almost lose themselves in it...
...Let me tell you: She lingers in the umbra between celluloid eternity and the accident of mortality, caught and hung up like an escaping prisoner on the barbed wire of his enclosure...
...Doris Grumbach's special gift lies in her ability to suit the style and structure of her novels to the world of which she writes...
...The subjects of the dreams may live in a misery of their own...
...in her deepest sleep he saw the signs of approaching, inevitable insomnia...
...When she laughed, he waited for the tears to come...
...a man treasures John Lennon records and kills what he admires, like a cannibal seeking strength from the flesh of his victim...
...Now over to the icebox, take out the eggs...
...The Missing Person is itself like a motion picture-a pastiche of scenes centered on the star, complete with flashbacks, close-ups and fade-outs...
...He has retreated into a silent world and lives out his days before an invisible camera, obeying an invisible director: "Go to the kitchen now slowly, don't rush it...
...What really became of her...
...She rises to heights of success in the glamorous film world of the thirties and the forties, and becomes the focus of unprecedented adulation without ever finding any identity...
...Her previous novel, Chamber Music, had the classical form, clarity, and brilliance of a composition for strings...
Vol. 109 • January 1982 • No. 1
