Rating: 
Summary: Headache inducing
Review: I am well aware of Ms. Oates outstanding reputation as a writer, but I found "Blonde" to be incredibly difficult to read, let alone enjoy. Her writing style in this book is irritating. Don't read "Blonde" if you have a mild headache, because after you've read 30 pages or so, you'll have a major migraine. I don't know, maybe you have to be an intellectual to enjoy this style of prose. If that's the case, then I'm definitely NOT an intellectual.
Rating:
Summary: Worst book of the year
Review: The year isn't over, not even half over, but I doubt that there can be another book this bad published this year, perhaps even for a longer time. The writing, which tries to pass itself off as "poetry" (in italics yet!) reads at best like a rushed first draft, unrevised, repetitive, at times incoherent. The story itself about a "fictive" Norma Jeane is grueling. Oates uses some details from Marilyn Monroe's actual life and then shrouds it in trashy fantasies, mostly violently sexual, so ugly at times that the reader has to recoil from it, especially since those parts are linked to a real person, however fictionalized. Despite all the publicity that Oates has received because of the association to Marilyn Monroe, readers like myself will feel a strong aversion to this tawdry performance.
Rating:
Summary: Yikes!
Review: I could barely skim the first ten pages there was so much DRAMA and so many EXCALAMATION POINTS! When I read that JCO used Summers book on Monroe I knew that her product could not be quality.
Rating: 
Summary: What Ever Happened to Norma Jeane?
Review: Oates has obviously completed a great deal of research on the life and times of Marilyn Monroe. Most people believe that she either committed suicide or accidentally died of a drug overdose. Oates suggests that she was murdered. So Blonde is essentially a murder mystery. Who did it? And why? Oates brings all of her formidable talents to bear as she develops her characters and her plot. In process, as the character and personality of The Blonde are revealed to the reader, they suggest that there was far more depth and complexity to the woman than her enduring public persona suggests. True, she was often victimized by those whom she loved and trusted (eg The President). However, as portrayed by Oates, she was also ambitious, cunning, and manipulative. Eventually she became a threat which had to be eliminated. And in the Oates account, she was.Other reviewers have referred to Oates's Blonde as "pathography" and the same can also be said of Bellow's Ravelstein. At which point does either work cease to be a biography and becomes a novel? I couldn't care less. This may not be Oates's finest work (as some have suggested) but I certainly enjoyed reading it. Also, I wonder what Oates would do with other subjects, such as Richard Nixon or Jackie Gleason.
Rating: 
Summary: masterful prose -- long but worth it
Review: Just because a writer produces many works should not mandate that we ignore new output -- like many of Oates' earlier works, the writing is breathtaking. I have to admit that since I'm in my early 30's, Marilyn Monroe per se holds little interest for me, but Oates' insights into the human condition and her winding prose held me to the very end of this 700 + page book. I would encourage readers who like well-written, literary works to give this a try even if the topic does not interest you. Its gives special pleasure to read the work of a great 20th century voice who is still living. Yes, much of the book is depressing, especially the early chapters about her attachment to her crazy mother and her search for love and affection. Despite the somber tone, the prose itself breathes life into the subject and shows hope. It made me want to find and read more of Oates' earlier works.
Rating:
Summary: Oh, no, not ANOTHER Marilyn book
Review: When a writer has to resort to writing about someone who has been dead for so long, that is a sign the writer's talents and ideas have just about run out. Please stop this silly notion that Americans are obsessed with Marilyn Monroe, the Kennedys and Elizabeth Taylor. Who cares about any of them?
Rating:
Summary: Another Accolade for the Genius of American Letters
Review: Who but Joyce Carol Oates can boast insight into such a wide range of American personalities? If Carl Jung was right, she's tapped into that great river of the American unconscious and continues to recreate for thoughtful, literary readers the best in American fiction. Aside from her momumental accomplishments in nonfiction and critical prose and her finely-wrought poetry, Oates has succeeded once again in bringing to attention the "underclass" of our society. No one who grew up in Marilyn's days would doubt Oates's recounting of the tabloid headlines. The mystery, however, always remained. Who was this woman, caught in the net of Hollywood producers, directors and dependency? What was she really like? Oates's faultless research has once again allowed her to delve into the real heart of the "economy" of American life. Perhaps that is why she seems to empathize with the Playwright whose profound connection to this lost woman's soul kept him involved for a time far beyond the limits of human endurance. Marilyn was a victim. Of profound rejection, of the prostitution of "beauty" for image, of the American dream. Perhaps that's why the Playwright felt compelled to try to save her, to save her at last from a self completely alienated from her true identity. Norma Jean seems to have had a gift. A gift left abandoned by those who used her for profit, who sewed her into revealing costumes. The girl in the mirror never had a chance. Thought-provoking criticism of societal perceptions of women. Recommended to all intelligent readers!
Rating:
Summary: Awesome arrogance
Review: There came Joyce Carol Oates riding on Marilyn Monroe's fame! Everywhere I look on interview TV, interview Radio, interview print, there's Carol Oates waxing authoritatively on the life of Marilyn Monroe, and yet obviating all criticism of her violent assault (here, it's called "a novel") on the beautiful movie star. I couldn't believe that Oates had actually claimed that Norma Jeane had guided her hand to write this tacky book, and I couldn't believe that Oates claimed that she felt she was the only one who could, finally, tell Norma Jeane's story, and that, in the course of her writing, she actually felt what it was like to "be" Norma Jeane! I couldn't believe that until I checked it all out, and there it was, in Oates' words, interviewed. Wow! Joyce Carol Oates as Norma Jeane/Marilyn Monroe! Awesome arrogance, eh? As for all the interviews, it took Marilyn Monroe to get Oates all this attention. And what for? For a novel that is sloppier than anything I have read in my memory, full of made-up scenes of hideous sexuality, meanness aimed at all her characters, women, men, gay and straight. Joyce brings no new fictive insight into this mess, only salacious imaginings, garnered from only she knows where. I kept pushing myself to plow through its zillion pages, in fascination at how bad it was. But I couldn't bring myself, finally to finish the last pages, that's how awful it was to read Oates' brutal account of Monroe's death. Perhaps stranger books will be written this year. If so, it will be a really terrifying year in literature.
Rating: 
Summary: I wanted to like this book so bad...
Review: ...but I was let down. I'm giving it 3 stars mainly for the quality of the writing. I'm a big Marilyn fan, but I'm not deluded. Yes, she utilized the casting couch. Yes, she had substance abuse problems. Yes, she had emotional problems. But was she really this dizzy, messed up, and miserable? Did she have only a few happy months (all put together) in her life total? I know Mr. President didn't treat her like a princess, but God, I think the author really went overboard in the scenes where he and the secret service treat her like a whore. I'd heard this book was the "ultimate" fictionalized Marilyn bio, but now I wonder if many reviewers called it that just because of the length. I did like the narrative from other's point of view, especially Joe, I mean the Ex-Athelete's. But it just made me depressed in the end and, bottom line, left me wanting more and feeling let down, and wanting to go back and reread Korda's "The Immortals" for the 20th time, because I just liked that one so much better, and it gave me more of an idea of what it would have been like to be in Monroe's shoes. I actually wish I hadn't gone and paid full price because I couldn't wait to get it here for a discount...I don't regret reading it, though.
Rating:
Summary: Flagrant distortions, messy writing
Review: ...Oates'...passage that involves a "menage a trois" withMonroe, Chaplin, Jr., and Edward G. Robinson, Jr.--two small-timeactors of the time--...is symptomatic of what makes Oates' novel uttrerly shameless and cruel. No such menage occurred in Monroe's life, and--most significantly--the two men Oates involves in it--lovers according to her--were not gay at all; they were known heterosexuals, and one didn't even know the other. Fiction, you say. Yes, but how significant that Oates chose to change these two heterosexuals into gay men of utter viciousness and cunning, the worst in the whole long, boring novel..., with its flagrant misue of lives to hang her fantasies and grudges on. In an interview, she claimed an arrogant right to Monroe's actual life, going so far as to say she felt she was "the only" one who could tell her story from "inside." She claimed Norma Jeane guided her hand through the writing. Doesn't that indicate that Oates would like her novel viewed as an "accurate" account? Certainly so, if dictated by the protagonist. Yet any criticism leveled at that kind of rampant abuse is thwarted by reminding that this is a novel. There is much contradiciton there. Just as horrible as its content is the book's messy writing, convoluted, repetetive, pretentious. The Kirkus reviewer described it accurately as "one of the worst novels ever written" by a writer taken seriously. I would add that it is also one of the most insensitive novels, cruel to its protagonist and to the other charactaers whose lives she alters to fit her very odd purposes.
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