Monroe as a Voyeur’s Mirror : QUEEN OF DESIRE, <i> By Sam Toperoff (HarperCollins: $20; 276 pp.)</i>

Sam Toperoff, author of “Queen of Desire,” has written a novel of painful, perhaps unconscious, irony. The “queen” of his title is Marilyn Monroe, who may have ruled men’s fantasies but not their hearts nor her destiny. The book might better have been titled “The Object of Desire,” since queen implies an autonomy that Monroe displayed neither in life nor in this book.

Employing 14 scenes (the number of acts in a television movie), Toperoff interweaves known facts with fiction. The result might be called friction , as in the painful abrasion of a tender-skinned life by a harsh surface--not unlike a 5 o’clock shadow scraping a child’s skin.

Toperoff’s book opens with just such a molestation. In the mind of the perpetrator, the child victim, Norma Jean Baker, all but asks for it: “Slowly, she pulls her knees to her chest; it is a protective gesture which (he) perceives as inviting because the child’s calves and the backs of her thighs are revealed as the hem of her nightgown is lifted.”

At the core of Toperoff’s book seems to lie a fine idea: Present Marilyn Monroe as an incest victim; demonstrate the devastating effect of molestation on the child by tracing a lifelong trajectory of repeated violations; dramatize the psychological catastrophe of the prematurely sexualized child. Marilyn Monroe, in this view, is tragically empowered by a precocious sexuality that victimizes her over and over, drawing to her a series of perpetrators who sense in her the weakened personal boundaries that invite domination.

But if that was the book Toperoff was aiming for, he sadly missed the mark. In “Queen of Desire,” Monroe the victim is victimized once again. The impulse of this book is so sexual that far from expanding our understanding of a complex woman, it explores those areas of her psyche and her life that have been probed and probed before.

Toperoff renders Monroe first as the child with a “coy” glance at her perpetrator. A few episodes further, we have Simone Signoret as voyeur and Monroe as a full-blown sex goddess dancing nude for an anonymous man: “The shimmering hair is in a black net. The nude body, round and pink like a Renoir, is flawless. Simone holds her breath. In one hand, Marilyn proffers an elongated breast; the other hand has disappeared between her legs. She is on her toes, her rump high in the air. She is tittering like a girl.”

As readers, we are spectators to these private moments Toperoff has concocted. Dead center in all of this, Monroe remains exactly that: dead. She is never convincingly alive on the page, and we never get into her head in a believable way. Toperoff remains fixated at the level of surface, of image: the fine downy hair on her cheeks, the weight of her breasts. “Now the breasts are exposed, altering themselves as she dances, lengthening, streamlining, rounding with various movements. Her nipples are coloring, hardening . . .”

Ostensibly the subject of this novel, Monroe is consistently viewed as object. This isn’t a book about Monroe. This is a book about men and Monroe.

In his brilliant book “The Ways of Seeing,” British art critic John Berger discusses the European nude as a series of conventions revolving around men and their fantasies of power. “In the average European oil painting of the nude, the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there. It is for him that the figures assumed their nudity.”

This is the guiding principle in pornography. The female subject, the object of desire, does not confront the viewer with a will of her own. She is, rather, a mirror enlarging and reflecting the viewer back to himself.

In writing his portrait of Monroe, Toperoff is claiming her as surely as the painter of a nude is subtly reminding us, “I saw her this way.” Like the traditional nude, Monroe is a mirror reflecting the artist, enlarging his importance. Instead of telling us much about how Marilyn feels, Toperoff tells us much about how men feel about Marilyn. Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller--were they up to it? Could they keep her? Just as a go-go club may employ pasties to evade an all-nude embargo, Toperoff employs the men around Monroe--their lust, their ogling--as the barest covering.

Marilyn Monroe, arguably this century’s premiere object of desire, has proven an irresistible mirror for many artists. Their reflections on her--a.k.a. her reflection on them--often has revealed a terrible narcissism. To Norman Mailer, she was like a delicious ice-cream cone, an object of appetite. He attacked her as subject like a greedy boy gobbling the goodies. Monroe’s ex-husband Arthur Miller, Maurice Zolotow, even Gloria Steinem--all have addressed her as subject only to render her over and over again as object.

Prancing on the subway grate, rising like Venus from the sea, Monroe as icon always interdicts Monroe as “I.” She is what we make of her. And perhaps it is inevitable. One thinks of Yeats’ poem, “Anne Gregory,” in which the poet warns the beautiful girl that not even God could love her for herself alone and not her yellow hair.

Toperoff gives us Monroe tweaking her breasts, kneading them and needing them, talking to them and talking through them like some ghastly sexual puppeteer: “She is drowsy now and fingering her nipple as she speaks.” Even on her deathbed, Monroe is sexualized and trivialized--playing with her breasts as she plays out her final moments.

Poet David Mura wrote of pornography: “There are certain states of mind that the closer one understands them, the closer one comes to experiencing evil. This is certainly true with the world of pornography. . . . For in pornographic perception, each gesture, each word, each image is read first and foremost through sexuality. Love or tenderness, pity or compassion, become subsumed by and are made subservient to, a ‘greater’ deity, a more powerful force. In short, the world is reduced to a single common denominator.”

In “Queen of Desire,” so is Marilyn Monroe.