How could anyone read Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes(1925) without thinking of Marilyn Monroe? In Howard Hawks’s 1953 film adaptation, Monroe plays Lorelei as a siren impervious to wit and with the power to slow the world to undulations. The cinematic humor depends on her laconic sexuality. Monroe’s slow and revealing talk stretches out everyday banalities: “Don’t you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You might not marry a girl just because she’s pretty, but my goodness, doesn’t it help?”

She speaks slowly for us because we seem to have forgotten our most elementary social facts. Monroe’s Lorelei is memorable, but it is not the Lorelei of the novel. The subtitle to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady. This Lorelei does not remind us of what we should know; she turns our knowledge inside out.

“It really does not show reverance,” she opines to us, “to call a gentleman by his first name,” so whenever she refers to her benefactor, she calls him “Daddy.” When in London, she observes that “some of the girls in London seem to be Ladies which seems to be the opposite of a Lord. And some who are not Ladies are honorable.” Such baffling remarks cascade to produce the novel’s distinct sense of speed, the rush of change that promises to leave conventions in the dust.

Lorelei is a cynic. As her friend Dorothy keeps falling in love with feckless men, she says, with pity, “when a girl really enjoys being with a gentleman, it puts her to quite a disadvantage and no real good can come of it.” Lorelei rarely develops any attachments, and she never misses a chance to move on to the next attraction. She leaves men behind in cities all across Europe. Soon, we learn to look at them less as exits from her highway life than the billboards she sees while passing by. Still, where is she going?

Readers often describe Lorelei as a gold digger, but it is difficult to imagine the gentrified afterlife that Lorelei would lead inside a handsome marriage. The novel has a sequel, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1928), which opens in restlessness:

I am going to begin a diary again, because I have quite a little time on my hands, with nothing to do for quite a time. I mean, in the first place I am full of ambitions and I think that practically every married girl ought to have a career if she is wealthy enough to have the home life carried on by the servants.

In Blondes, Lorelei is always “improving [her]self.” Her pursuit of progress, however, does not tend toward some definitive end. Before it was published in book form, the novel was serialized as sketches in Harper’s Bazaar, and that potentially infinite form of the periodical publication is a fitting container for her ongoing improvement.

Lorelei accelerates the world around her. It is foolish to try to settle accounts while in her orbit. This is a problem for not only bookkeeping but also psychoanalysis. When in Vienna, Lorelei is analyzed by “Dr. Froyd,” and he is astonished that she never dreams; she has no inhibitions. A mind without inhibitions, however, has no intentions either. “My mind was really a blank,” she says as she recounts the event that led her to leaving Little Rock, “and when I came out of it, it seems that I had a revolver in my hand and it seems that the revolver had shot Mr. Jennings.” Lorelei often sees herself as the unwitting instrument of events over which she has no control.

Whether we call Lorelei too fast and loose or a little slow on the uptake, we do so with the fantasy of finding truth in speed.

In her later memoir, A Girl Like I (1963), Loos uses speed as a figure of distortion with no discernible cause: “war years are in general colorless; events too painful for human acceptance are taking place, and time itself becomes like those disks used in experiments on color; divided into the primal colors, a disk is made to whirl so fast that it takes on the dun gray of battleships and gun barrels.” Loos lays her simile out in the passive voice and elides the subject of action, the cause of the “whirl” that blends the colors of everyday life into a “dun gray.” We can only wonder whether a slower civilization would have veered from the “battleships and gun barrels.”

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is not a cautionary tale that makes speed out to be an allegory of progress without purpose. Those who implore Lorelei to slow down stretch the truth too. Her suitors ask her to stay with them, promise to marry her, or pay her their undivided attention—but only after they are done with their jobs. If this novel is preaching a lesson on speed, it is to untether it from morals, even from meaning.

Which brings us back to Monroe’s Lorelei. One of the most enduring myths of speed is the dumb blond. Others are smarter than her, faster than her. She is the spectacular outcome of splitting beauty from intellect. This slow creature is routinely sacrificed to the quick cult of wit. Loos saw many during her time in Hollywood and wryly observed that “beauty combined with lack of brains is extremely deleterious to the health.’’ Laughing at a dumb blond sets the pace of everyday life to that of talking heads who feel their minds to forget the flesh. When Monroe slowed Lorelei down, she may have adjusted the speed of the character, but she still embodied a fantasy. An enlightened world could leave women like her behind.

In 1962, a young Michael Fried prophesied “the advent of a generation that will not be as moved by [Andy] Warhol’s beautiful, vulgar, heartbreaking icons of Marilyn Monroe as I am.” That generation has yet to arrive. (As Loos said of her Lorelei, “She’s harder to kill than Rasputin.”) Just when we think we have left her behind, she bounces back as Reese Witherspoon or Sabrina Carpenter. And each new avatar initiates the generational ritual that moralizes the speed of women—as too fast or slow—renewing the pretense that there could be an ideal pace to everyday life.

In the climactic court scene of Legally Blonde (2001), the prosecutor and the judge become impatient with Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) as she discourses on the cardinal rule of perm maintenance. They urge her to get on with her point. Elle soon fires off a series of questions that reveals the witness was lying about being in the shower at the time of the murder since she had just gotten a perm and knew better than to get it wet. Elle’s rapidity then sets the pace. The witness suddenly confesses to the crime, the crowd cheers, and the trial comes to a timely end. When the press gathers around Elle to ask her how she figured it out, her client responds, “because she’s brilliant.” Elle, however, has a different, more consoling answer. She chirps, “the rules of hair care are simple and finite. Any Cosmo girl would have known.” Elle believes there is wisdom in the things that take time.

Loos’s account of speed is more discomfiting. Whether we call Lorelei too fast and loose or a little slow on the uptake, we do so with the fantasy of finding truth in speed. For Loos, this search is as misguided as it is enticing. The title to one of the novel’s chapters is “Fate Keeps on Happening.” There is an affected helplessness here, the same kind that lets Lorelei say that “Mr. Jennings became shot.” That chapter title, however, also reveals what Lorelei’s admirers want from her—a life delightfully oblivious to the senseless miseries of bad timing or the sorrows of being left behind.