Book 324: Blonde
Every time I read this fictionalized account of Marilyn Monroe’s life, I struggle with it. I do that a lot with Oates, actually, I start reading her and then remember why she frustrates me, and then I forget and start reading her again. For an author this prolific, I guess it’s not surprising that some of her books are less good than others, but this one is positively schizophrenic.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I really hate narrative devices in which language gets all truncated and weird to make a point. I’m fine with playing with language, but mangling it is just annoying. And there are huge chunks of this book that ramble in a really nonsensical way, and make it really hard to follow or get into the story. I think I’m turning into a literary conservative. I might not have liked Wuthering Heights, but at least the language was good.
It’s always interesting to read fictionalized accounts of people’s lives, because it’s hard to tell where truth and fiction blur, and how many liberties were taken. Monroe herself is such an enigmatic and tragic figure in a lot of ways that I think Oates was really able to play with her a lot more than she could have with other real life people. And I wonder what the legalities are there, with fictionalizing lives.
Monroe is always portrayed as broken and crazed, and she had plenty of reasons to be. But what if she wasn’t? What if she got into drinking and drugs because that’s what everyone else did, not because she was some kind of profoundly flawed person? I find that unlikely, but I wish authors would play around with that more. I think it’s easy to write truncated wannabe surrealist language to make characters seem all crazy-style, but it would be nice to see an author actually use language well, to portray a high-functioning crazy person with great language and no bad grammar and awful punctuation and cutesy misspellings.
Demographics:
Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates. Published 2000, 738 pages. Fiction.
Tags: book project