Buy Low Price From Here Now
In her most ambitious work to date, Joyce Carol Oates boldly reimagines the inner, poetic, and spiritual life of Norma Jeane Baker -- the child, the woman, the fated celebrity and idolized blonde the world came to know as Marilyn Monroe. In a voice startlingly intimate and rich, Norma Jeane tells her own story of an emblematic American artist -- intensely conflicted and driven -- who had lost her way. A powerful portrait of Hollywood's myth and an extraordinary woman's heartbreaking reality, Blonde is a sweeping epic that pays tribute to the elusive magic and devastation behind the creation of the great twentieth-century American star.
Readmore
Technical Details
- ISBN13: 9780060934934- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
See more technical details
By Thomma Lyn (East Tennessee)
Blonde is a fictionalized account of Marilyn Monroe's life, and she appears, by turns, as Norma Jeane, "Marilyn", and The Blond Actress. But the story Oates tells is Norma Jeane's. She, alone of the three, is the real person.
Norma Jeane is the child whose mother, an employee of the (movie) Studio, showed her at age six a picture of Clark Gable and told her he was her father, knowing the little girl had no way to know who Clark Gable was or who he wasn't. Norma Jeane never, to the end of her life, knew who her father truly was, but her mother, in one of her faux-"generous" moments, told Norma Jeane that her father would come back for them both someday, the ultimate, empty feel-good dream which not only would remain unfulfilled but which would set the stage for many more empty dreams.
Norma Jeane is the young girl whose mother never allowed hugs, never allowed her daughter to call her "Mommy." Norma Jeane is the young girl whose mother tried to drive herself and Norma Jeane headlong into raging California fires before being stopped by a policeman, and she's the young girl whose mother tried to dunk her into scalding water to drown her. And Norma Jeane is the young girl who, managing to escape her mother's unreasoning rage, was placed in a state orphanage after her mother was taken to the state mental hospital.
Norma Jeane is the adolescent who wound up in a foster home where she yearned for the love and acceptance of Elsie, her foster mother. And as soon as Norma Jeane felt free to trust her foster mother, Elsie married Norma Jeane off at sixteen because she was jealous of how her husband was looking at Norma Jeane.
And Norma Jeane is the young woman who wanted so desperately to be the Perfect Wife Whom No Man Could Leave that her young, first husband felt suffocated by her neediness and joined the military to escape.
Norma Jeane is the young woman who, for fifty dollars, posed for nude photographs because she badly needed the money, photographs that later made men millions of dollars, photographs for which she asked not to have to show the soles of her feet -- she wished, at least, to be spared that indignity -- but even that wish, however small, was denied.
Norma Jeane is the young woman whose personna became known as Marilyn Monroe, who made the Studio millions of dollars of which Norma Jeane got only a small part. And Norma Jeane is the young woman behind the personna who felt both suffocated by and apart from it. Norma Jeane wanted a loving husband and children, but Marilyn, whom Norma Jeane thought of as the Big Blond Hairless Doll, wanted adoration, attention, and stardom. And "Marilyn" always won because she was stronger.
In Oates's novel, "Norma" was what Norma Jeane wanted to be called by people she loved and trusted, and by people she wanted to trust and love her. Not "Marilyn." And after reading this book, it seems more appropriate to think of "Marilyn Monroe" not as Marilyn but as Norma Jeane Baker, a testament to the sheer power of Oates's storytelling.
If Marilyn Monroe is the suffocating (to Norma Jeane) Studio personna, then the Blond Actress is the woman who lives to play roles, though she has no role, no identity, of her own. And both women are facets of Norma Jeane. The two facets served as tools in Norma Jeane's hands to try to get what she craved most -- approval, love, acceptance -- and they are the two facets under whose ponderous weight she ultimately was crushed. A common mantra Norma Jeane repeats to herself throughout the book is if I fail, I die. Every single day of her life she felt she was required to earn the right to exist.
I don't have to warn about spoilers in this review, since everybody knows what happened to Marilyn Monroe. But Joyce Carol Oates does an incredible job of getting the reader inside Norma Jeane's mind, from her painful childhood to her troubled adolescence to the roller-coaster ride of her Hollywood stardom. Oates lets us into other people's heads, too, among them the Ex-Athlete and the Playwright, two men who loved Norma Jeane and were loved by her but who either would not or could not help her off the path to self-destruction.
We also see into the mind of the cold, cunning President to whom "Marilyn Monroe" was nothing more than a perk of Presidential power, some"thing" tawdry to use then discard, a metaphor for what, in the greater picture of history, happened to Norma Jeane herself if not to "Marilyn", who continues to thrive today.
Blonde tells the story of the shadow-side of Marilyn Monroe's success. Oates's Norma Jeane is a tragic figure. Perhaps nobody could help Norma Jeane but the Dark Prince, the man in her mind who was sometimes her faceless father but who, more often, was the Man in the Movies opposite the Fair Princess Norma Jeane became, a man who never existed for Norma Jeane in her real life but who, as long as she lived, she could imagine might exist someday as long as the camera, the only eye whose acceptance she could always count on winning, was turned her way.
By Barry Kiefer (Kentucky)
It is sooo obvious that this author is a Marilyn Monroe hater, yet she wants to make money writing a book about her. Just another person exploiting Marilyn for their own gain, she has been dead for years and still it goes on. Marilyn Monroe was not a perfect person (nobody is), I and everyone else who knows the truth about her knows that she was not the kind of person depicted in this book. Anyone who hates gossip,jealousy,and lies about people who are not here to defend themselves, DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME AND MONEY ON THIS BOOK!!!
By Julie Merilatt (Chicago, IL)
I had very mixed feelings about this book. While I was completely intrigued by Norma Jean/Marilyn, I was disconcerted about the style. It is written in a very dream-like prose, often shifting perspectives and form. Oates portrays Monroe as a very sympathetic character, an innocent Norma Jean who is only playing the roll of Marilyn as she would any other roll in a movie. But she tries so hard to prove she is not as dumb and naïve as people would think, while at the same time contradicting herself in her words and actions.
There were certain aspects of her life that I found tedious, and I can't say whether it was the narrative or just my frustration with these phases of Monroe's life, namely her childhood with her mother and her relationship with Cass Chaplin and Eddy G. However, there were other relationships that were intriguing, like her marriages to her first husband at 16, "The Ex-Athlete" and "The Playwright" and her tryst with "The President." She is extremely clingy and needy at times, referring to her beaus as "Daddy," in her twisted need to fulfill the roll of a father figure which she lacked growing up.
At the heart of this book was the insecurity of Monroe and her desperation to be accepted. As talent and fame rise, her downward spiral increases, as does the drug use. While she was always a fastidious actress striving for perfection, as her demeanor worsened, she had more difficulty conjuring her character of Marilyn. In the end, it was loneliness and self-doubt that was her downfall. As for Oates's conclusion, I found her take on Monroe's death to conspiracy theoretic. Overall, I think the biggest struggle for me was not only the sheer size of the narrative, but the fact that I don't know much about Marilyn Monroe and I had a hard time separating what was fact and what was artistic license. The next time I want to read about her life, I will perhaps read Monroe's "autobiography" or a non-fiction source. It seems to me that while Oates touched on so many defining moments of her life, the overall story lacked some of the detailed nuances that would have shaped the novel into a more defined narrative.
By Bruce Oksol (San Antonio)
Ambivalent because that's how the book left me. Maybe confused, certainly affected. I had not read Joyce Carol Oates before and have always been curious what attracted her fans.
"Blonde" has a certain 21st century Virginia Woolf style. But, whereas Virginia Woolf was more poetic in her prose, and wrote in a dreamier, drawn-out style, Joyce Carol Oates tends to shout when she writes, seeming to be concerned that the reader might not understand her point.
A fictionalized biography allows the author to paint her own impression, highlighting what she thinks would have been the important events/memories of the subject's life. The author can give weight to five or six events that most likely defined and affected the subject, rather than writing a similarly thick book that gives equal weight to all events in a subject's life.
I have mixed emotions about the graphic sex; it was necessary to paint the impression that Joyce Carol Oates intended to portray, but it runs the risk of Hollywood producing a movie that focuses on that one aspect. Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury Group agreed to talk frankly about all issues, including sex, particularly homosexuality, and it would be interesting to see her review on this book, if she were still alive.
Henry Miller and Anais Nin were much more graphic; they were much more pre-occupied with physical sex in much of their writings.
Joyce Carol Oates was not pre-occupied with physical sex, but had she omitted these details, one might think that she was afraid to "go there." Some readers will not be able to get beyond the images of the graphic sex; most readers will find Marilyn's psyche much more robust than Hollywood tended to portray it.
For me, Marilyn's concern for her mother and the sweet things she did for her mother tells me much more about Marilyn than anything else.
By the way, Marilyn Monroe would not have had time for this kind of fiction; she was reading Doestovsky and Darwin's "Origin of the Species" which even I find difficult, and biology/chemistry were my majors in college. Pop/contemporary literature would not have kept her interest.
By U. Restauro (Hawthorne, CA USA)
I saw the movie and it was horrible. Marilyn Monroe was a real person who does not settle for abuse. The author is a woman who has no respect and is incorporating her own sex life in the book. As a English Literature major I can tell she is suffering from a lack of sex. But I know that there are good writers out there who write Marilyn out of love and respect and do their homework.
Images Product
Buy Blonde: A Novel Now
