Showing Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates

In Blonde, Joyce Carol Oates--one of America's most prestigious and versatile writers, author of numerous novels and short fictions--joins the ranks of those who have competed to tell the story of one of her nation's most compelling legends: Norma Jeane Baker, or Marilyn Monroe. In her "Author's Note" to this monumental novel, Oates describes the work as a "radically distilled life in the form of fiction". "For all its length", she continues (the book is over 700 pages long), "synecdoche is the principle of appropriation". No straightforward account of a life, then--supposing such a feat were possible--Blonde is both fragmentary and exhaustive, fictional and historical. Divided into five chronological sections from "The Child 1932-1938" to "The Afterlife 1959-1962", the narrative voice shifts from first to third-person perspective, telling of a life that, from the start, is bound to the fascinations of cinema: "This movie I've been seeing all my life, yet never to its completion". Almost she might say: "This movie is my life!" In Oates's revision of "Marilyn", that fascination is, in turn, bound to Norma Jeane's painful, and paradoxical, tie to her mother: "When I was born, on June 1, 1926, in the charity ward of the Los Angeles County Hospital, my mother wasn't there". Being loved as an actress, being loved as a child, are crucial themes of Blonde, themes which agitate throughout Oates's telling of Baker's drive to fame and love, to "Daddy" and babies--"Except if Daddy could make her pregnant she would love Daddy again"--to beauty and death. It's the stuff of sensation and scandal, but Oates's reading of her subject is tactful, empathetic and, above all, alert to the complex femininity now carried through the life and image of Marilyn Monroe. --Vicky Lebeau