Material Girl : MEDUSA’S GIFT, <i> By Lois Gould (Alfred A. Knopf: $19; 204 pp.)</i>

Lois Gould has chosen to set her eighth novel on an Aegean island, but “Medusa’s Gift” is no day at the beach. Rather, it’s one more aggressive exhumation of Marilyn Monroe’s tormented remains.

“Figment of surgery, media wet dream, victim of the century,” the fading film star Magdalene (mononymic, like Monroe’s modern descendant) no sooner arrives on the island than she’s stung by a fierce medusa jellyfish and left to recover as a small army of parasites intrigue over the “trunks full of incendiary paper” that she’s brought with her--letters and diaries and photographs that could make a lot of powerful men nervous. As Magdalene puts it, in a line representative of the novel’s level of tastefulness: “The real vagina dentata is the mouth of a woman who knows stuff, and isn’t afraid anymore.”

Magdalene, rumored to have slept with the President, is a variation not only on Marilyn but also, it would seem, on Natalie Wood--”A falling star tumbled from a chartered yacht sailing in shark-infested waters, leaving a stunned husband and (his or her) lover on board”--and Mary Jo Kopechne: She “never meant to grab the wheel” from the surviving brother in a famous family, never meant to send the car into the water.

Magdalene’s trunk is another parallel universe, containing as it does the effects of an Ann Woodward, a Princess Grace, a Sunny von Bulow: “Diary bearing the initials of an unhappy socialite who shot her husband. Nude pictures of a serene princess, the body considerably younger than she had been when her car plunged over a cliff. . . . Paranoid note on ecru vellum notepaper, signed by an heiress who had been in irreversible coma for a decade.”

If “Medusa’s Gift” were merely a roman a clef, one might give it a smiling, slightly weary, welcome. But Gould’s publisher insists that she has written a novel “about the worship of the famous, and the price of--and profits in--fame.” This is where Grace Craven, distinguished professor of film (“not a mere chronicler of Linda Darnell”) comes in. Much of the novel involves her attempt to extract revelations and meaning from Magdalene, as the reader waits to see if Grace’s lover, S. Z. Hroch, will succeed in getting a group of museum trustees to pony up for Magdalene’s archive.

While convalescing, Magdalene comes to appreciate Grace’s forthright pursuit of her secrets (“What--who-- are you waiting for? You can’t sit on history forever. Daring the world to steal it out from under you--”), and the two of them begin a love affair of their own. Farther down the island’s slopes, the rest of the novel’s characters flail in the folds of Magdalene’s fame. The reader meets the actor, William Hack, (“recovering from being married, drunk, and gay--all at once”), the documentary film maker, Terry Mould, and Rob Twist, the erstwhile Oxonian classicist who owns the taverna and has an interest of his own in Magdalene’s archive.

None of the plot is easy to figure out, which is not the same as saying it’s subtle. It’s merely elusive, pretentiously presented in bits of Magdalene’s voice, fragments of Grace’s notebooks and longer stretches of jittery third-person narration. (None of the dialogue is in quotation marks, a maddening trend among novelists who probably think they’re making a point about the ineffable nature of reality.)

One can fairly tell a reader that the book finally turns on the realization that Magdalene’s effects will be worth more if she’s dead than alive, and the discovery of her footlocker containing--you may want to put down your toast and juice for a moment--”a bloody great Swiss bank of world-class ejaculate. . . . Sperm! No lover ever refused. She calls them viable options. Meaning they could be activated. Historic babies. Certifiable son of a President, senator, prince, attorney general, head of M15. . . .”

There are, I suppose, the makings for broad farce here, but Gould seems more intent on creating an atmosphere of portentous, cheesy decadence. The novel is wildly overwritten (“rocky hillsides rose from the shore like cupped palms bringing water to a dying friend”), and the author cannot resist following up a witty observation with some over-the-top grossness. Consider the following paragraph:

“Again Magdalene threw back her head in the soundless mime of laughter that had been photographed, holographed, silk-screened, reproduced on dinner plates. Showing only the long column of throat. Perfectly phallic, some said. A throat that invited Dracula to fellate it.”

Gould does launch at least one hypothesis worth devoting another, better novel to: “The thing one hates the most about one’s life, when young, comes back later, not much changed, and suddenly it seems right, comfortable, fine.” But in “Medusa’s Gift,” pseudo-profundities smother such notions, as the author spends her time developing the obvious idea that celebrity has become more important than truth (“Whether she turns out not to have the goods almost doesn’t matter. She’s as real as money can buy.”)

If this really is a novel about the perilous worship of fame, Lois Gould should count herself among the victims.