Braver’s ‘Misfit’ Reviewed

A review of Adam Braver’s quietly compelling novel, Misfit, is published in today’s San Francisco Chronicle:

“Braver wisely avoids gimmickry as he posits the uneasy coexistence of Norma Jeane and Marilyn within the same person. He explores that coexistence by imagining how Norma Jeane/Marilyn had to live with it. Imagining a therapy session, Braver gives us the patient’s wry point of view. ‘(I)t does make you want to smile every time she talks about Marilyn and Marilyn’s past,’ he writes. ‘Maybe it’s because Marilyn’s past is not more than a few years old? … Or that that past is a work-in-progress being created on a singular basis in this very office?’

Braver’s Marilyn believes, or wants to believe, that she can permanently erase Norma Jeane by replacing her not only with an invented Marilyn Monroe of the present, but, significantly, with a Monroe of the past as well. If you could invent a character the public sees on the movie screen and believes to be real, why couldn’t you make people believe that person has always existed? Why couldn’t you make yourself believe it?

Despite her omnipresent mythology, and the actual events and people in her life, we very quickly find ourselves letting go of the real woman as we suspend disbelief in Braver’s character. It’s a sleight of a writer’s hand in the most astutely executed way. And like any great magic trick, we never precisely know how it’s done.

To some extent, it’s about the details, obviously the result of painstaking research, but crafted as only a great fiction writer can pull them off through a seamless application of imagination to fact.”

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