The [main] character in The Missing Person is modeled on Marilyn Monroe; thus, both the public persona and the infantilism are of pathological proportion. Set in the 1930s, the novel tells of Fanny Marker, who grows up in Utica, New York, the daughter of a pugnacious beautician who lives with hard hats. One of them rapes Fanny when she's 14 and sends her on her way to waitressing, small-town whoring, a trip to New York, a homosexual agent who gets her into pictures and, finally, her transformation into Fanny Fuller, one of the most potent images of sexual fantasy ever produced in Hollywood.

Fanny remains locked up inside Franny: brutalized, lost, emotionally speechless, a damaged child screaming silently for help from behind her famous drowsy eyelids, her open wet mouth, her sexually anesthetized body. A number of good people fling themselves against her extraordinary inertness, each one hoping to induce response; all are defeated by the infinite power of intractable damage. For a long while these people continue to replace one another in her life because a sickly sweetness emanates from the fetal vulnerability inside the gorgeous face and body …, but each one in turn (the Joe DiMaggio figure, the Arthur Miller and the Billy Wilder) gives up, abandoning her to a neurosis that is siphoning the oxygen from the room.

However, that's all right with Franny. She simply does what she's always done since she became a movie star: she disappears. Periodically, when the panic threatens to drown her, Franny smears dirt on her face, puts on workmen's clothes and disappears into Los Angeles. Within days or weeks she is found and returned to her somnambulistic life where she goes through the motions until the panic rises again, and once more she becomes a missing person. By book's end, her disappearances have become a general bore; for Hollywood, Franny Fuller is a dead issue.

Doris Grumbach is not an untalented writer. She has skill, and sometimes power. The description in Chamber Music of Robert Maclaren's slow dying of syphilis … is truly fine, filled with affective horror. And in The Missing Person, the description of Willis Lord—a character based on John Gilbert, the silent movie star who became an alcoholic recluse after he failed to make the transition to talkies—also accumulates into a fine portrait of the deranging silence inside these empty lives. But the metaphoric use to which Franny Fuller is put simply doesn't work. (pp. 375-76)

Franny Fuller is written to say more, but she doesn't. She doesn't because she is written as she might have written of herself: all innocent-cynical sheer surface meant to reflect back the etherized vacancy of a life that does not, finally, know more about itself than the insufficient person living it knows. For this kind of writing to work well the accumulated surfaces must "know" more, must reveal the character in spite of herself. Franny is not revealed against her will. No deeper understanding of her disintegrated self emerges from these pages that fail to accumulate into something memorable or suggestive.

Chamber Music was not an accident or a mistake. Doris Grumbach, who has a talent for rendering the famously ignorant or banal in a detached, recording voice, thinks, as the Pop artists did, that the thing speaks monumentally and metaphorically for itself: just put Campbell's tomato soup or Marilyn Monroe on the canvas or on the page exactly as the advertisers or the publicists would, and something marvelous happens. Not true. There is a misplaced assurance here that doesn't earn itself in the work. The terrifying irony beneath a famous childish life that became a national image remains unachieved, and we are left with a voluptuously underweight character scratching along the thin hard edge of an unbroken surface. (p. 376)