Customer Reviews

Blonde: A Novel

5 star:		(83)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(53)

 

 

I was never a Marilyn Monroe fan. I would never even watch a movie of hers. I didn't want to jump on what I thought was a bandwagon of people who loved her because she was so tragic. I was never interested in the dumb blonde sexpot thing. I've always preferred the more exotic Joan Crawford or Rita Hayworth. I knew Monroe's story but it never became personal for me. It never spoke to me.

Oates' words spoke to me. I have a love/hate relationship with her work. I like it but it often annoys me. I also said the first couple of pages had me thinking I'd never get through the book. Well, after that I never wanted to put it down. I was totally engrossed for all 738 pages. I often read several books at once. In this case, I wasn't interested in reading books that I had just gotten in from my favorite authors. There was just no comparison.

Oates breaks some "rules". She throws in dialogue imagined and real. Sometimes, you're not sure who the story teller is. You have to "listen" as it unfolds. Sometimes, the story is told as poetry. Sometimes a chapter is a page long. A great thing about this is... she doesn't do anything to the point where it's annoying. For example, sentences without verbs--which I always notice and it personally drives me nuts. She does it sometimes, but not on every page. She does it enough that it's needed and not jarring.

If Oates wants you to feel like the character-- frightened, sad, confused, numb, glad, she weaves her words so that the experience of reading enables that feeling. You don't just view it as an outsider, you are a participant.

I could relate to the character personally. I understand being smart and wanting to be smarter and reading all you can to know as much as everyone else but always feeling inferior, always sounding like the airhead. I can grasp that, hold it in my hand and KNOW that experience. I understand being able to read philosophers and have great opinions but never being able to verbally express myself about any of it in any kind of coherent manner.

Also, she portrays Monroe as multidimensional. Lost people often don't know who they are. None of us are always one thing, are we? We are often contradictions of ourselves.

I always thought Monroe played herself. I didn't consider that maybe the dumb blonde was a brilliant talent, something she gave them, almost like a joke or a slap in the face. I also understand being able to use that, to fool people with it, allowing it to be an advantage and then being able to offer a beautiful surprise for anyone who is special, more deserving.

I've ordered all of Monroe's movies. I've got some catching up to do.

I HIGHLY recommend this book.

Marilyn Monroe died when I was in my late teens. It has always intrigued me why her legend lives on and on in a world where beautiful blondes are as plentiful and ephemeral as butterflies. What was it about Marilyn Monroe that has inspired the books, the songs, the photographic retrospectives decades after she's been gone? Having just finished "Blonde" by Joyce Carol Oates, I think I know.

From her first to her last breath, the fictionalized life of Norma Jeane Baker exudes tragedy. Her childhood is brutal, puberty puts her at risk, her early marriage is a fiasco, her treatment by her agent, her photographer, and the studio bosses unpardonably exploitive. When she finally achieves fame, Norma Jeane is too fragile and broken to savor it. She becomes her insecurities. Even those who love her and wish her well (husband playwright Arthur Miller) can't save her. She can only bring them down in her self destructive nose dive. If there is any truth to her treatment by President John Kennedy, he was the most dispicable of all. Oates never uses the image of a candle in the wind made famous by Elton John, but the metaphor works. Norma Jeane, aka Marilyn Monroe, never ceases to be a fascinating case study. Towards the end the writing gets a little sloppy and the reader grows impatient for the author to get on with the end, which one knows will be horrible, and yet when it happens it will break your heart . You are sorry the book has ended because you can never get too much of the central character, her amazing life story and the stormy times in which she lived.

In BLONDE, this remarkable, epic new novel by Joyce Carol Oates, we come to understand the larger-than-life personality of Marilyn Monroe vis a vis the elusive, nearly invisible person of Norma Jeane Baker. Oates mediates between the dual consciousnesses of Marilyn/Norma Jeane, and renders a mesmerizing hybrid of public celebrity and private martyr. In the especially engrossing early sections of the book, Oates explores the devastating childhood and abandonment that Norma Jeane endured, and conjures old Hollywood in its lurid and fallen glory. Oates also offers new impressions of the men in Marilyn's life that shaped her vision of herself as a woman: Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, and--to a lesser degree--JFK all feature in this book in ways that will surprise even Marilyn aficionados. What makes this book so exceptional is that Oates manages to breathe new, believable life into the technicolor figure that all of have come to know as nothing more than a celluloid fantasy. This book is truly exceptional, and is undoubtedly the crowning achievement of Oates's prolific career. I've read every one of her books, and I think her mastery is uniquely evident in BLONDE.

Already a fan of Joyce Carol Oates, when I finished _Blonde_ I almost immediately became a fan of Marilyn Monroe as well. Yes, it is a very long, somewhat foggy fictionalized account of Marilyn's life, but having now read several different biograhpies I see how close to the truth Oates really came. Changing many names (foster parents and producers, for example) and referring to Marilyn's husbands as "The Ex-Athlete" and "The Playwright", Oates nevertheless fills the book with all the people who surrounded Marilyn, and reveals the roles they played in both her desperate need to be loved and her blind ambition to become famous. The best part about this novel is Oates' ability to BECOME Norma Jeane, to get inside of her head and write in the actress' voice in an extremely believable way (hence the sometimes confusing and "foggy" aspect of the narration). _Blonde_ is a very haunting and beautiful work that will always be with me.

I have never read Joyce Carol Oates before. I have actually never read a Marilyn book, or seen a Marilyn miniseries, so I came to this a MM virgin.

I finished the book two day ago, and I was so impacted by this novel that I can't stop thinking about it. It drained me. I am left almost hurt, and I can't understand how seriously I connected with the Marilyn character. I hope to goodness that this was completely fiction, because I don't see how Norma Jean could have lived as long as she did, trapped in herself.

As a portrait of madness, this book is amazing. You know how it's going to end, but you are driven to read to the last sentence, with no hope that it will turn out well.

There is an amazing amount of reviewers who do not like this book at all. Maybe people's projections of Marilyn and her life are still too strong to allow her to be Norma Jean. Otherwise, I don't see how this book could get one star.

The powerful use of imagery, stream of consciousness, shifting points of view, and poetry make this beautiful book perhaps out of reach of the John Grisham crowd. That is not an insult, I also read John Grisham. However, this style of writing is measurably different than most NY Times Bestselling authors. I would recommend this book to those who can adapt to different styles and views in the same novel. Otherwise, if you are reading this only because you want to know about Marilyn Monroe, but have a short attention span, then look elsewhere for your information.

I'm amazed at the variety of reactions "Blonde" has sparked. I'm not sure whether most of them are reactions to Joyce Carol Oates (why are so many people furious at her? Is it jealousy because she may be the only human on earth who suffers from absolutely no writer's block and can crank out one thought-provoking novel after another?)or is it the cult of Marilyn Monroe, the unknowable icon? At any rate, let's look at the book.

It is grim. The writing is very fine, and Norma Jeane never, never gets a break. The result: a sad read, probably pretty much like her life. The question is, do you want to go through it with her? I did, but found "Blonde" terribly disturbing and terribly depressing. We learn nothing new about Norma Jeane or Marilyn Monroe, but do get an idea about how she put up with her life for as long as she did and why she finally brought it to an end.

Feminist? Gay-bashing? (see earlier reviews). Hardly. The pain on all sides in this book makes it very hard to take.

I am a fan of both Joyce Carol Oates and Marilyn Monroe, so reading "Blonde" was an absolutely necessity for me. I've read numerous biographies about Monroe and I had to keep reminding myself that "Blonde" is a work of fiction, which was difficult to do because Oates has written such a haunting and personal account of the life of this legendary actress.

"Blonde" chronicles Monroe's life from her birth until her death 36 years later. The reader learns about young Norma Jeane Baker's mentally unstable mother, Gladys, who tries to kill her daughter and ultimately sends her to live in an orphanage. Beautiful Norma Jeane gets married at the young age of sixteen, but the relationship is short-lived and soon the career of Marilyn Monroe emerges. Oates explores several of Monroe's numerous relationships in great detail, including her marriages to "The Ex-Athlete" (Joe DiMaggio) and "The Playwright" (Arthur Miller"), as well as her affair with "The President" (John Kennedy), which is (at least from Oates' perspective) the relationship that finally pushed the long-suffering Marilyn over the edge.

I had trouble getting into "Blonde" at first because it tends to drag a bit in places. It's more than 700 pages long (supposedly Oates' first draft was twice that length!) and it really shouldn't be...I think Oates could have trimmed a minimum of 200 pages without losing any essential content. However, after a while the book really drew me in, and I couldn't put it down! "Blonde" explores the mystery of Marilyn Monroe: how the world perceived "The Blonde Actress" and how she perceived herself. The descriptions in the novel are very detailed and Norma Jeane/Marilyn is portrayed as a very vulnerable yet determined young woman who just never managed to get a break in life. I felt my heart breaking along with Norma Jeane's throughout the course of this novel, and I feel like I have a whole new understanding of this woman's life, even though I just read 738 pages of fiction (Oates is a damn good writer!).

If you can cope with the sheer size of this novel, I think you'll really enjoy it. Fans of Marilyn Monroe will enjoy this unique version of her life story and everyone else will appreciate this as another great Oates book.

It seems that Joyce Carol Oates wants it both ways--to have her readers believe (as per her interviews)that Norma Jeane actually guided her hand while she was writing this book (really odd!), and at the same time thwart criticism for irresponsibly trashing the great star's life by claiming that it's "just fiction." To say that Marilyn Monroe would admire this fictive rendition of her life is absurd. Who would like to have thrown at them all the erotic humiliations that Oates imagines for Monroe? Beyond all that, some wonderful writing might justify her approach, but this is writing at its worst, as the Kirkus reviewer noted ("one of the worst novels ever written"), it is a truly badly written novel. Did Oates bother to read it over after she'd finished it? There are pages and pages here that read like a rough first draft. The book is loaded with Symbols, not well delineated characters; and all the typographical quirkiness annoys, as do the terrible poems that Oates attributes to her character of Norma Jeane. All of this amounts to a trashy performance that will certainly not serve the author's reputation well. It's an endless book, too, and I kept reading only because I wanted to see how bad it could remain, and the ending sustained the level of the rest--pages and pages of messy exploitation.

I read in an interview with her that J.C.Oates claims that during the writing of this novel, she came to know what it was like to be Norma Jeane, and felt Norma Jeane's hands guiding her to write this novel. Not only is that very strange, but it is certainly extreme, to blame Norma Jeane for writing this really scurrilous novel about herself. Yes, it's a novel, and not to be taken as biography; but Oates uses Monroe's name and plays coy with other real people in her life (the Playwright, etc.) How would she respond if a similar novel appeared using her name, and exporing, judgementally, the most intimate aspects of her life? Aside from all that, if the novel were a masterful literary creation, as her abusive fans keep claiming it is, insulting anyone who thinks otherwise, then all could be tolerated. But it isn't even a good novel; some of the prose reads like a first draft, not even read through by the author after she typed it, repetivie and convoluted. There are good passages throughout, but they're smothered in verbiage, pseudo-lyric passages that are undecipherable, especially those attributed to a contrived "Actor's Manual." As to the content: The obsessive references to Monroe's odors (or those of the character Oates names Norma-Jeane/Marilyn-Monroe), her bodily functions, the constant sexual denigration of her--all signal a somewhat vengeful detestation of her own protagonist, not the claimed compassion. Certainly Norma Jeane would not have encouraged J.C.Oates to write those passages (invented though they are) while using her name. What remains is what others have indicated, and exposed themselves to attack for pointing out, that the name of Marilyn Monroe sells. The whole matter of invasion of another's life in such a reckless, hostile manner (fictionalized or not, but using an actual name) is sad, really sad.

It's been almost two months since I read this truly awful book, and the sense of it still lingers with me like an after-taste--those horrifying scenes of sexual brutalization that Oates makes up for her fictional Norma Jeane/Marilyn Monroe; those endless ruminations on God-knows-what, rambling, incoherent; those mean-spirited passages that pretend to be Norma Jeane's judgement of herself, but are, of course, Oates' judgement of Norma Jeane. Based on what? Oates owes her fans an apology, for allowing this reckless, over-wrought book to go out like this; didn't an editor see it? Is Ms. Oates so beyond reproach (but why?) that no one cautioned her about this disaster? I can't think of another book so messy in every way.