Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

Blonde

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865 ratings, 3.92 average rating, 124 reviews (more data...)

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published

by Fourth Estate

binding

Hardcover, 752 pages

isbn

1841153710 (isbn13: 9781841153711)

description

In Blonde, Joyce Carol Oates--one of America's most prestigious and versatile writers, author of numerous novels and short fictions--joins the ...more

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All ratings | 5 stars (277) | 4 stars (288) | 3 stars (178) | 2 stars (64) | 1 star (17) | avg 3.92

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Bess

Bess rated it:

(review of isbn 006093493X)

02/25/08

recommends it for: EVERYONE

Finally finished, wish I were still reading, all magic is gone from life now, pls advs.

This is the New Feminist Text. I honestly think if every gal too young to remember (or too young to even have a mother who actively remembers the effects of) the women's movement of the 60s were given a copy of this book, we'd have much less patriarchy snackdom in the world, much more equal pay, and way fewer pointy-toed stilettos.

Marilyn Monroe was continuously, systematically screwed over, pawned, a...more

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Krenzel

Krenzel rated it:

(review of isbn 0060196076)

12/14/08

bookshelves: 1001

Read in November, 2008

I have never watched a Marilyn Monroe movie and, before reading "Blonde," Joyce Carol Oates’ fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe, I knew pretty much nothing about her life, other than she had been married to famous people and sang "Happy Birthday" to JFK. I chose to read "Blonde" to find out more about Marilyn Monroe, to learn some of the truth behind the icon, so that she would become more real to me and less abstract. Ironically, I think this is the opposite...more I have never watched a Marilyn Monroe movie and, before reading "Blonde," Joyce Carol Oates’ fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe, I knew pretty much nothing about her life, other than she had been married to famous people and sang "Happy Birthday" to JFK. I chose to read "Blonde" to find out more about Marilyn Monroe, to learn some of the truth behind the icon, so that she would become more real to me and less abstract. Ironically, I think this is the opposite of what Oates had in mind for readers when writing her book, as she has described Marilyn Monroe as a universal figure and, advancing this idea, presents "Blonde" as an updated Cinderella fairy tale using a series of abstract figures, starring Monroe as the "Fair Princess," a number of men as the "Dark Prince," and Monroe’s two husbands as the "Ex-athlete" and the "Playwright." However, while Oates tries to emphasize the universal elements of Marilyn Monroe’s fairytale rise to fame, ultimately she undermines the myth as she details Marilyn Monroe’s inner thoughts and concerns, making her appear less like a universal figure and more like a real, and unique, person.

In "Blonde," Oates initially focuses on the Cinderella-type fairy tale rise of Marilyn Monroe from obscurity and neglect to worldwide fame and adulation. Marilyn Monroe is born Norma Jeane Baker. She doesn’t know who her father is, and her mother is emotionally unbalanced and tries to kill her, ultimately being sent to a mental facility and leaving Norma Jeane as an orphan. But in a fairy tale, "always there was the Fair Princess. And always the Dark Prince." The Dark Prince arrives in the form of Otto Ose, who swoops into Norma Jean’s life to save her from her boring job. He takes her pictures and sells her image, allowing her to be discovered by the Studio. Oates recasts Norma Jeane’s story as a fairy tale: "Once upon a time," she says, there was a little girl who came to the Walled Garden and discovered the secret way in from her fairy godmother. "There’s a hidden door in the wall, but you must wait like a good little girl for this door to be opened," she tells her. "You must win over the doorkeeper – an old, ugly, green-skinned gnome. You must make the doorkeeper take notice of you. You must make the doorkeeper admire you. You must make the doorkeeper desire you." Only then, would the ugly gnome fall in love with her and the two "live happily forever in his Garden Kingdom." As Otto offers Norma Jeane $50 to pose nude, she thinks, "I saw that I must be sold. For there I would be desired, and I would be loved." Norma Jeane sells herself and is transformed into the "Fair Princess," Marilyn Monroe, who is loved and desired by many men.

However, Oates does not end her story with this transformation of Norma Jeane into Marilyn Monroe, as the last part of the book details the inner life of Marilyn Monroe. Although Norma Jeane could be seen as a universal figure – a poor orphan who struggles for fame by selling herself – Marilyn Monroe herself is a unique figure and icon. While Oates tries to maintain the fairy tale elements of the story by giving Monroe’s famous husbands and lovers mythic qualities by referring to them only as the "Ex-athlete," the "Playwright," and the "President," these are not clearly not abstract figures. Whether they are named or not, they are clearly Joe Dimaggio, Arthur Miller, and John F. Kennedy. Furthermore, Oates doesn’t even attempt to make Marilyn Monroe’s movies abstract events, as she refers to specific movies like "The Asphalt Jungle," "Niagara," and "Some Like It Hot," and describes Marilyn Monroe’s specific roles in those movies as "Angela," "Rose," and "Sugar Kane." These are not Cinderella roles the reader is going to project herself into; these are Marilyn Monroe’s roles. As readers, we gain even more insight into the life of Marilyn Monroe as Oates details her inner life, making Marilyn Monroe less abstract and more like a real person. For example, as she watches the happy ending of her character Cherie in Bus Stop, she starts crying: "Why was I crying? Maybe because in actual life Cherie would’ve been drinking a lot. She would’ve been missing half her teeth. She would’ve had to sleep with the bastards. . . . There wouldn’t have been any good-looking yokel-cowboy Bo to throw her over his shoulder and carry her away to his ten-thousand-acre ranch." In exposing us to the real life of Marilyn Monroe, the fairy tale is lost, as we see all the gory details of her destruction. She is not some abstract Cinderella, but rather a real person with her own doubts and anxieties. As the last part of the book details Marilyn Monroe’s inner life, "Blonde" loses its mythic qualities, as the real-life Marilyn Monroe replaces the universal Cinderella-type figure of Norma Jeane.

While Oates tries to emphasize the universal elements of Marilyn Monroe’s fairytale rise to fame, ultimately she undermines the fairy tale as she details Marilyn Monroe’s inner thoughts and concerns, making her appear less universal and more like a real, and unique, person. Reinforcing this idea, Oates ends "Blonde" with a poem titled, "The Fairy Tale – THE BURNING PRINCESS," which clearly relates to the life of Marilyn Monroe. In this poem, Oates describes a Beggar Maid transformed into a Fair Princess by the Dark Prince as he gives her a "magic elixir," cleansing her body and bleaching her hair before setting it on fire. The Princess dives off the platform, leaving her burning body and the maddening screams of the crowd behind. Oates writes, "[T:]he burning Princess was dead. & I [the Beggar Maid:] was alive." But is this true? Does The Beggar Maid (Norma Jeane) endure, while the Princess (Marilyn Monroe) dies? The answer is no – clearly, it is the icon of Marilyn Monroe that endures. While Oates’ goal behind "Blonde" is to teach us all a universal truth, in reality we learn more about the life of Marilyn Monroe than we learn about ourselves. Although "Blonde" has piqued my curiosity about her life, and maybe I will watch one of her movies now, I am still not sure what the lesson of Marilyn Monroe’s life is for the rest of us.
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Alison

Alison rated it:

08/18/07

bookshelves: contemporaryfiction, fivestars

Read in May, 2007

recommends it for: classic movie fans, marilyn obsessees

I had no idea what this book was about when I checked it out from the library. It wasn't until I got it home that I noticed the cover was a silhouette of Marilyn Monroe with her back to the camera. This book kept me up til the wee hours for the seven days it took me to finish it. It is a fictionalized biography in that it recalls the life of Marilyn from birth to "mysterious" death at age 37 (?) from an overdose of sleeping pills with conversations and situations imagined as they mi...more

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Colleen

Colleen rated it:

(review of isbn 2253152854)

08/15/08

This is totally unfair, but I gave this book a 4 only because the story itself was so gut-wrenchingly difficult for me to read, and not because of the quality of the story or the writing. This is one of those books that's situated on some fine line between fiction and biography, and it's about the life of Marilyn Monroe. The way that Oates is able to get into her character, even the dialogue of Marilyn, makes you feel that you are really reading an autobiography at times, set in story form. I ho...more

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Caitlin

Caitlin rated it:

(review of isbn 2253152854)

08/23/08

Read in August, 2008

Blonde: A roman a clef for a vie a clef

Melancholy, a little hungover, and still in bed at 11:30 one morning during my reading of this book, I descended into mournful rumination about fiction. For the first time in my life, fiction felt truly like the inferior literary form--the slag sister of Verse, Essay, and Reportage. Why write fiction? Why tell yourself silly stories, much less expect others to endure your own arrogant fantasies? In retrospect I think this Great Doubt sprang from simple ...more Blonde: A roman a clef for a vie a clef

Melancholy, a little hungover, and still in bed at 11:30 one morning during my reading of this book, I descended into mournful rumination about fiction. For the first time in my life, fiction felt truly like the inferior literary form--the slag sister of Verse, Essay, and Reportage. Why write fiction? Why tell yourself silly stories, much less expect others to endure your own arrogant fantasies? In retrospect I think this Great Doubt sprang from simple confusion: Why write a novel about Marilyn Monroe's life when she was a real person? More specifically, why should Joyce Carol Oates (who has also published fictionalized autobiographies of such unseemly cultural figures as Jeffrey Dahmer ["Quentin P." in _Zombie_:] and Burke Ramsey ["Skyler Rampike" in _My Sister, My Love_) employ this strange technique yet again to write about one of the most famous women in the world?

In Joyce Carol Oates's other fictionalized autobiographies, the names of her famous subjects are changed or masked, albeit barely. In _Blonde_, Oates doesn't need to take this precaution: her main character already operates under an alias--"Marilyn Monroe"--a preposterous alliteration confected to conjure the very ridiculous fantasy character who once, in the Time Before, was Norma Jeane Baker. And "Marilyn's" life is as fictional as it gets. Indeed, it is almost a lie to try to write non-fiction about her. "Marilyn" was an actress, a male fantasy. She exuded sex and selflessness and happy hedonism, yet alone and killing herself nightly with drugs and champagne. She was famous for her unreliable narratives, for changing the "facts" of her personal history over the course of her short life. And, unlike other famous confabulators such as Bob Dylan (another Oates muse) whose personal fictions are deliberately concocted in order to create a false mystique, "Marilyn" seemed to inhabit a world that was genuinely unknowable, in which her experiences were no less real in the retelling than they were when they first occurred.

Adding to this hallucinatory swirl, Oates changes spellings of real names (Norma Jeane's mother, Gladys Mortenson, becomes Gladys Mortensen), retains some real names of real people (Marlon Brando, Cass Chaplin) while abbreviating others (The President is, of course, Jack Kennedy; C is Tony Curtis, and Z is Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century Fox), and at times completely renaming still more (Norma Jeane's first agent, Johnny Hyde, inexplicably becomes Mr. Shinn). But none of this seems out of place in the story of Norma Jeane, aka Marilyn Monroe, aka the Blond Actress. Nor does the collapsing of several major life events into one monumental representation, or the ambiguous attributions of character to action. In the life of Marilyn Monroe, we know that to some extent all of the details of a story are just bits of a script that can be changed, ad libbed, sent back for edits, or never completed at all.

The great controversy of _Blonde_ seems to be its implication that the CIA had Monroe assassinated. In true form, however, the motive behind this arrangement--whether to protect or to shame the President--is left unexplained. But this, too, is really just a detail. It could even be a paranoid, confused, or purely unconscious delusion. What matters in _Blonde_ is not who wanted Monroe dead, or which men and women really had sex with her, or how many abortions Marilyn had versus how many miscarriages---the real, actual, truth has always been and will always be Norma Jeane's unknowable existence, her mercurial experience. Just as the audience's experience of Marilyn Monroe--who could appear at one moment beautiful, the next cute, then grotesque, tragic, and then again angelic--is forever in bewildered flux, so too was her experience of her self. The facts of this story are the living body, the dead body; the human gift and curse of self-consciousness; human fragility in struggle with the dogged human instinct to survive; violence and sex, love and loss; what it is to be a woman, which no one but a she can know.

Soft, brittle, and false, Marilyn Monroe's blond hair is one of the less subtle and potent symbols Joyce Carol Oates employs. But the language and the rhythm, and above all the painful compassion that lie between these 700-some pages, is Oates at her best. She shows that Norma Jeane is not a woman to be revered as a heroine or an historical figure to be studied; rather, in the end, she is a woman to be experienced, a human story to be told again and again in many forms and with many versions.

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Mama Kaye

Mama Kaye rated it:

(review of isbn 2253152854)

05/12/08

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in May, 2008

I never thought I'd be interested in reading a book about Marilyn Monroe, but wow, what a wonderful experience! Oates points out from the beginning that this is a work of fiction -- it is not a biography. However, it is clear that while much of the text is a product of Oates' imagination, it is based on a solid foundation of fact.

Once again, I thoroughly enjoyed Oates' writing style -- she has a way of getting inside the heads of her characters unlike few other authors I've read. The reader...more

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Peggy

Peggy rated it:

(review of isbn 2253152854)

01/23/08

Read in January, 2008

recommends it for: Joyce Carol Oates - I think her best

What a book!!! I began reading this book Sunday night and seven hours later realized I hadn't put the book down.. If I stopped for a drink of water, I don't remember it..
Such a tragic story.. and though Joyce Carol Oates calls it a work of fiction.. not all is fiction.. "1950: In a season of clandestine radioactive explosions. Fierce hot winds rushing across the Nevada Salt Flats. the deserts of western Utah, birds stricken in flight plummeting to earth like cartoon birds. Dying antelope,...more

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Caitlin

Caitlin rated it:

(review of isbn 2253152854)

11/07/07

Foxfire was the first JCO I ever read, and this was the second. If Foxfire made me start to *maybe* think I was falling in love with JCO as a writer, Blonde transformed that maybe into a definite in the first line.

An avid Marilyn fan for years, I have always been most interested in firsthand accounts of her acting methods and her status as a misunderstood genius. And there's a lot of that here. But there's so much more. Most reviews of this book use the word "ambitious" and I'm...more

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Nicole

Nicole rated it:

(review of isbn 2253152854)

09/20/08

Read in September, 2008

At 700+ pages this one isn't a quick read, and the Marilyn's life wasn't exactly uplifting. But as someone who started out thinking that she was a ditsy blonde, I was intrigued and surprised at how different I thought her life was. I’m curious enough to head down to blockbuster and rent some old movies now.

Though the book definitely made you sympathetic to Marilyn, the writing seemed to go on endlessly about non-essentials, and 100 pages could probably have been shaved off of this.

B...more

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Joey

Joey rated it:

(review of isbn 0060196076)

04/15/08

Read in May, 2000

recommends it for: Monroe fans, biography readers

I am not an avid fan of JCO; I find her writing inconsistent. Her style is candid; the ability to make a single word into a sentence. Other novels are overwrought with a gothic style that feels like you're wading through mud to find the story.

'Blonde' is a favorite, and may even be among my top 20 favorite books.

JCO uses a fictional, autobiographical constuct to tell the sad, ill-fated life of Marilyn Monroe. Because JCO uses conjecture as she illuminates the story of the most famous ...more

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Jo rated it:

(review of isbn 0060196076)

09/03/08

Read in September, 2008

I didn't want this book to end, mainly because I knew how it was going to end. Still, my impression of Norma Jean, Marilyn, Magda, Cherie, whoever she was at any given time, definately changed. She became a real person with real issues. Putting her addictions aside, which were a tool of the studio, she really was just a regular dysfunctional person. Nobody is perfect. Her start in life was chaotic, so why shouldn't her life be. My heart broke for her at certain points. Imagine what she would hav...more

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Onara

Onara rated it:

(review of isbn 0060196076)

11/24/08

bookshelves: 2008-reads, historical-fiction

Read in November, 2008

This is such a disturbing book, especially if you're a woman. But wow, it was amazing. Depressing, but amazing. She uses a variey of writing styles throughout the book, almost as if she's trying to showcase what she's capable. But really, it only bothered me a couple times. Lots of disturbing scenes of men using her sexually. There's an extremely disturbing portrayal of JFK (not that it bothers me patriotically but rather just a horrid man who uses her with his armed men to reinforce his p...more

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Judy

Judy rated it:

(review of isbn 2253152854)

11/18/08

Oates is a wonderful writer. I thoroughly enjoyed this fictionalized account of the life of Marilyn Monroe. The author claims to have done heavy research, etc. to make the story authentic. There were things in the book that I wanted to take as fact only to remember that it might be fiction. This brings me to the question of why anyone would want to read a fictionalized account of someones life. Although I enoyed reading Oates the author, I will now want to read something that claims to be factua...more

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Indra

Indra rated it:

(review of isbn 2253152854)

07/17/08

Read in July, 2008

This book frustrated me, made me think, moved me, creeped me out, and had passages that were quotable, all at once.I am a fan of Marilyn Monroe's movies and have read many books about her over the years, but this fictionalization packed more of a wallop than any "real" story of her life. JCO is obviously a talented and lauded writer, but I have found her work inconsistent and just a tad too steeped in creepy sexual energy. For this subject, it worked. I feel changed by this book. It...more

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Kelly

Kelly rated it:

(review of isbn 2253152854)

05/28/08

recommends it for: Anyone who's in the mood for a racy read

This book is well worth reading. There are over 60 biographies on Monroe but none have captured her true history like this FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY. Oates uses facts and blurs them with fiction in order to give the reader an understanding of Monroe's psychology as a product of American industry, namely the STUDIO. It weaves in conspiracy theory to keep the story exciting and allows the reader to continually question "what if?"Monroe's ghostly figure, with her white hair, white skin, blank s...more

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Katy

Katy rated it:

(review of isbn 2253152854)

01/04/08

Read in April, 2005

recommended to Katy by: bought it after Oates reading

This monster took me over a month to read (around 800 pages), and I also left it in my hotel room in Calgary in 2005 and it took a couple of weeks to get it back. I noticed that Oates began use the ampersand (&) instead of the word 'and' about halfway through. I thought it was a literary device at first, but my suspicion now is that it was to save space. The book was good. Despite its length, I never found it cumbersome or laborious. It was easy to split my time between that and other books....more

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Jen

Jen rated it:

(review of isbn 006093493X)

09/27/08

bookshelves: fiction

Read in September, 2008

well, i've been wanting to read this book for a while. i've had it for a few weeks now, and have only made it through the first few chapters. it's a DOOZY. intimidating in size, and of course it's typical Joyce (who i do love). my goal is to finish it by summers end, but so far i'm having a hard time really getting into it. it's been sitting pretty by my bedside, just begging to be read, but instead i keep picking up the last Harry Potter and re-reading that instead. i need to get motivated. i'l...more

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Andrea

Andrea rated it:

(review of isbn 2253152854)

10/23/07

Read in January, 2004

So much has been written about the life and death of Marilyn Monroe, much of it specualtion and sensationalism. I am willing to bet this is the best fictional non-fiction account of her life. It really delves into the historical details of her life from childhood to adulthood, and it also offers a realistic, not Hollywood look into her thoughts and emotions. It's a long read, but it goes by very fast. After reading it, I just wanted to find out more about Marilyn. I rented all of these tv d...more

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Bill

Bill rated it:

(review of isbn 0060196076)

12/17/08

Read in January, 2002

fascinating novel about the life of Marilyn Monroe...JCO's conclusions of what happened to MM are similar to mine

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Amanda

Amanda rated it:

(review of isbn 2253152854)

12/30/08

Read in May, 2003

I am a Marilyn fan and did not care for how Marilyn was portrayed in this book. It is def. that of fiction.

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