Blonde
A little maudlin, but entertaining - From what I ve read of hers, it seems to me that Joyce Carol Oates likes very much to centre her story around a girl who is an innocent of the soul, whose very loveliness is her downfall via brutish men. Blonde is the supreme example of this. Certainly, it is very well written and I don t disagree with many of the positive things that have been said about it. Hundreds of pages of the same, almost maudlin, characterisation can get a bit tiresome, though. It s perfectly valid to draw attention to Marilyn s insecurity, neediness and desire to perfect her craft, and doubtless the men of Hollywood and elsewhere at the time could be ruthless little snakes and predators. But subtlety-wise, Oates verges on the hysterical. It also gets quite blurry towards the end and seems to lose focus, the end is rather confusing. I suppose this might be an intentional parallel to Marilyn s life, though!
Brilliant, moving, touching - A simply beautifully written book - stunning. I highly recommend this. I read a really bad book before I picked this up and had started to despair - thinking there were no good writers left in the world, well there are - and here s one. This is a work of genius, warmth, compassion and style. Such style. Oates is a captivating writer, cleverly offering clues to characterisation and creating sentences of such sheer force, that the book bursts into life before you. Wow. I would suggest that if you have eyes, you read this. I can t recommend this highly enough.
Losing Her Self - The novel Blonde immediately raises questions concerning the reasons for its creation beginning with the choice of its subject: Norma Jean Baker. To write a lengthy novel on a person who has inspired volumes of biographical accounts and publicity may appear to be a spurious task. Yet, Joyce Carol Oates has published Blonde whose original hardback length reaches 738 pages (she reports the original length to be over 1,400 pages before editing) making it the longest novel of the thirty-nine novels she has published previous to Blonde. Why was it necessary for Oates to write this novel now? A partial answer may lie in her disclaimer at the beginning of the novel that clearly defines the work as fiction and that it should not in any way be understood to be a biographical account of the actress. To mark her novel as a work of the imagination is to distance Blonde from interpretations of it as a faithful historical recreation. It insists that the novel intends to deal more with ideas rather than fact. Then, why choose to base the characters and events upon historical occurrences? For Oates purposes, recognizing the historical basis of a subject in a novel links the ideas presented with real concerns and issues rather than letting them flounder in an abstract space. That is not to say that fiction which recognizes itself to be purely fictional cannot discuss real ideas, but Oates novelistic method uses these historical bases as points for ideological engagement. The novel represents and explores many of the essential themes with which Oates has concerned herself in her previous works of fiction. Marilyn Monroe, being the focus of tremendous public attention, has been turned into a mythic and still mysterious figure in American culture. Oates chose her as a subject specifically because so much emphasis has been placed upon Marilyn Monroe, the public image and not on Norma Jean, the historic person. From this base Oates engages with some of her primary motivations as a novelist which are to mingle social commentary with an emotional reimagination of American images in a highly formed literary novel. Oates attraction to the subject of alter-egos and split identities suffuses into her fiction and forms one of the primary subjects of Blonde. There is a recurrent tone Oates uses with many of her female characters when trying to create what she calls psychological realism. Within this literary style she creates a characters who reveals a hypersensitive awareness of her or his own being and a special attentiveness to the perspective of the other characters. The characters establish a delicate relationship to themselves where they are a viewer watching themselves. In her early years, Oates describes from Norma Jean s perspective how this relationship to her Norma Jean self is created: There was a Friend-in-the-Mirror. As soon as I was big enough to see. My Magic Friend. There was a purity in this. Never did I experience my face and body from the inside (where there was numbness like sleep), only through the mirror, where there was sharpness and clarity. In that way I could see myself. The Magic Friend is an ontological observer of the character. It is an objective perspective of the self but is a part of the self at the same time. This is a useful tool for the character to use within her survival of the fictional world as it allows her to manipulate other characters around her by understanding the way they perceive her. However, it is also a dangerous way to condition her place in relation to the world because it divides her sense of reality. As the novel continues the Magic Friend becomes an addictive sedative to Norma Jean leading her further into the realm of the fictitious which serves as an inescapable hall of mirrors where she is unable to distinguish one constructed identity from another. In this divided sense of the self, Oates reveals some of her most powerful literary influences for Blonde.Norma Jean is cited as reading Dostoevsky several times throughout Blonde. Her involvement with his novels betrays not only her intellectual vigor, but a reference to how an individual can contain multiple perspectives in a single consciousness or Bahktin s theory of the dialogic. Oates incorporates this theme into the structure of the novel. She has described the novel as a posthumous account from Norma Jean s perspective. The narrative logic traces her memories in a chronological order interspersed with her self-destructive desire and fated sense of being. Within this perspective is an existential crisis of trying to construct a secure sense of being that is unimpeded by the labels of others. In this overly conscious, split sense of self, Norma Jean parallels the Underground man. This intense consciousness draws the individual into hopeless conundrums concerning the reality of being. Oates portrays this overly conscious self as a division between the inner, spiritual being and outer, materialistic being. The division is irreconcilable because the different interpretations of being are desirous of different consequences. They represent an ideological divide particularly relevant to the American sensibility as Oates more fully discusses in her novel Bellefluer whose central family plays out these dualities through the generations and to tragic consequences. However, as they are contained within the individual of Norma Jean she is led into believing that only by selling the superficial side of her being can she gain the love and recognition she needs. Her original name has been lost to this profession as a blonde actress and this identity can only prove to temporarily solve her unfulfilled sense of being. This need to sell the self to others makes up the central subject of Blonde. It is a powerful and emotionally moving read.
truly amazing - A truly enthralling book, once you start to read it you can t stop.You forget that it s fiction and embrace every character as if real.You get fully involved with each and every one which come bounding out of every page.A truly riviting read,if you like good drama and honesty then this is the book for you.
A Masterpiece - Despite its length the novel is totally absorbing.It seemed to me to capture the essence of Norma Jean s troubled,complex personality.I read this book sometime ago ,but it has remained with me as few books do.I feel that the description of masterpiece is well-deserved.