Blonde (Oates) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Oates's achievement is remarkable because the immediate, visceral impact of Monroe's image is so very much a phenomenon of film, defying the inward-looking, speculative mind of literature.... If a novel can't deliver Monroe's beauty, a force that profoundly shaped how people behaved toward her, it can, better than any film, give us her interior world.
New York Times Book Review


Grimly compelling...a portrait of Hollywood as terrifyingly hallucinatory as Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust.
Wall Street Journal


Blonde is one mighty, tremendous book...Oates has become most like William Faulkner. Every novel is a newly invented form of language, a deepening vision of America. No writer today has today has delved into the mysterious circumstances of being alive at this time in America—explored our entire social strata—to the extent that she has. Oates is perennially mentioned for the Nobel Prize. Blonde, one hopes will be the book that will convince the Swedish academy.
The Nation


(Audio version.) Will our fascination with celebrities never cease? Over the past few years, there has been a proliferation of Marilyn Monroe biographies. Oates, at least, is not focused on the celebrity but on the frightened, orphaned Norma Jean, a figure perfectly in keeping with other lonely outsiders who populate her fiction. Writing in short sections that carry over extremely well to audio, she's able to achieve segues that add depth to the life being explored and fabricated. Details, images, thoughts, and feelings abound, so credible we forget such insights could not have been known to any biographer. And as to facts, Oates explains in an illuminating interview (included on tape six) that, as a fiction writer, she's able to simplify, combining "several" abortions into one, merging various characters. True, there is no suspense in this audiobook, narrated by Jayne Atkinson: none of the haunting stream-of-consciousness Oates so masterfully placed into Mary Jo Kopechne's mouth in her novella Black Water, but these tapes have much to offer. Considering the book is 768 pages, even die-hard Oates fans might appreciate this adeptly abridged audio version. Recommended, especially for larger collections. —Rochelle Ratner, formerly with Soho Weekly News.
Library Journal