Atkinson's voice is just this side of sultry.She deftly changes her tone and pacing for other characters in the story...

Freeing herself from the confines of a journalistic retelling of well-known facts, Oates masterfully creates a powerful and deeply disturbing American tragedy.
—Book Magazine, March/April 2000

Jayne Atkinson's performance in this audio presentation adds enormous dimension and depth. Without overacting, without cliche or caricature, she captures Monroe's breathy, hesitating voice and with it captures both the vixen and the victim.

Oates tackles the most enduring and evocative cultural icon of the 20th century in this "surreal" historical novel. An "engrossing," unsparing vision of Marilyn Monroe: the child, the girl, the flawed woman, and the fated celebrity, "transforming her from the familiar, flat graphic image Andy Warhol gave us into a multidimensional fictional character." "I was like a dog with a bone - I chewed away all night on the pages of this novel, burning the midnight oil." "Bravo!" "An extraordinary work." A lone dissenter said "tediously factual."

Oates may have created the most important novel of her career.

A fascinating imagining of the hellish battles that Monroe fought with herself.

An overwhelmingly vivid and powerful rendering of a human being who outlived her life.

Atkinson narrates Oates's fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe in an intense, slightly husky voice that immediately grabs and holds the listener's attention. Film actress Atkinson deftly switches back and forth between Oates's prose, a breathy Monroe (who "comments" periodically throughout the novel), Monroe's brassy mother, Gladys (who soon succumbs to mental illness), and a series of powerful, impatient men who callously exploit the vulnerable young actress. Her only false note is the dialogue of John F. Kennedy, which she reads without any attempt at the president's distinctive Massachusetts accent. Abridging Oates's epic is no small feat, but all the major events in Monroe's life remain in vivid and often heartbreaking detail. The audio also includes an exclusive interview with Oates, who talks about her impressions of Monroe as a person and as an icon, and discusses how she came to write the 700-plus- page novel, which she originally intended as a 175-page novella. Based on the HarperCollins/ Ecco hardcover (Forecasts, Feb. 14). (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

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," New York Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Bottled Blonde

There is no denying that Marilyn Monroe is one of America's most beloved icons. Still, when the reader is confronted with a massive copy of Blonde, Joyce Carol Oates's fictional retelling of Marilyn Monroe's life, a question does come to mind: What could Oates possibly have written about Monroe's brief life and career that could fill more than 700 pages?

The answer? Sex.

Blonde is one long, racy read. Oates recounts every telling event in the life of Norma Jeane Baker, from her early days with her grandmother to the years spent with her crazy mother to her teenage years in an orphanage and, following her mother's institutionalization, in a foster home. After Norma Jeane's first marriage, the hagiography continues with the birth of "MM," her subsequent marriages, stardom, and the "questionable" circumstances of her death at the age of 36 (not surprisingly, Oates suggests that, rather than succumbing to an accidental overdose, or intentional suicide, Marilyn was murdered). And the thread weaving together all 36 years is sex.

Casting-couch sex is to be expected in a book on or about Marilyn Monroe, and Oates doesn't disappoint. One encounter takes place not on a couch but rather on a white rug during a visit to a famous studio honcho's aviary, which turns out to be nothing more than a few stuffed birds in his office. Marilyn -- at once naïve and knowing -- gets busy with tons of men in Blonde. (Oates tactfully names few outright, preferring instead to use thinly veiled sobriquets like "the Ex-Athlete" or "the Playwright.") There are also countless chapters on lesser-known yet quite torrid love affairs, including a three-way relationship Marilyn carries on with Charlie Chaplin Jr. and Eddie Robinson Jr. They live and love and drink and do drugs together. Their sex sessions, as re-created by Oates, are heated, fascinating, tangled. They even have a name for themselves: The Gemini. Oates covers all of Marilyn's affairs, including the much-rumored liaison with President Kennedy. In one memorable scene from this era, Oates has the duo shacked up in a New York hotel, the President pressing Marilyn's head down, down, down as he speaks with Castro on the telephone. In this après-Lewinsky era the scenario is neither shocking nor original. But in 1961? Boop-boop-bee-doo!

Oates roots Marilyn's sexuality strongly in her past, beginning with the men she meets while living with her foster family. A teacher. A detective. A few boys her own age. Her foster mother hates the way her husband looks at Norma Jeane's "sweet little ass," so she marries Norma Jeane off at 16 to a lanky boy named Bucky Glazer. Norma's wedding, loss of virginity, and married sex life span chapters. It is hard to imagine Monroe preparing meatloaf dinners for a husband, but Oates makes it believable. Norma and Bucky are doomed from the start. So are Norma and most men. And there are many men. Oates lists pages of lovers taken from the files of the FBI: Robert Mitchum, Eddie Fisher, Mickey Rooney, Clark Gable, Samuel Goldwyn, the Marx brothers, Ronald Reagan, et cetera.

Marilyn's body makes her irresistible to men. Oates makes this body a character of its own, chronicling its various developmental phases. At first, Marilyn hates her body and the commotion it causes. But gradually she learns to use it, to work it. Sometimes she embraces it. It is a body ravaged by loss, by time, by men. It weathers abortions, miscarriages, multiple drug overdoses, and bleach (the chemicals that create her signature blonde coif sting when applied to pubic hair). Oates pounds home her sexual theme with constant commentary on Marilyn's looks, her breasts, her skin, her ass. Oh, that ass! Oates is unrelenting. Her language and tales are often harsh: Marilyn can't even go to a public theater to watch one of her own movies without drawing the unwelcome attention of a man who masturbates to her image onscreen and off.

Blonde is both an unwieldy and fascinating work. Oates convincingly reduces this larger-than-life movie star to a tiny, broken girl. Oates's Marilyn is truly unwell, in many ways as disturbed as her mother was. Her sexual misadventures and inability to function in any orthodox relationship are clearly tied to her abandonment as a child. She is by turns miserable, unstable, insecure, and delusional. Ultimately, Blonde itself is impressive; an eerie, gossipy, voyeuristic experience. Enticing, but also devastating.

Alexandra Zissu is a freelance writer and writer-at-large at Fashion Wire Daily. She has written for The New York Observer, The New York Times Styles section, Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, and Self.

This is a big, complex, visionary, imaginative, make-you-sweat-and-whince-while-reading book.

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

[This] book is great...it is a powerful work of art...It has the energy and locomotive force of Dickens or Hugo...
—Bookforum

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.
—The 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

“In Blonde, Oates has found a character and a narrative mode that exploit all her strengths as a writer . . . a narrative intensity often found in her stories but never sustained so successfully in a long novel and an exuberant mastery of language that suggests a writer at the peak of her power.” — Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“A fascinating imagining of the hellish battles that Monroe fought with herself.” — Playboy

“Joyce Carol Oates’ scary and rhapsodic novel about the life of Marilyn Monroe is saturated with the mysteries of eye and camera. . . . It’s eccentric, exhausting—and remarkable.” — Salon.com

“An overwhelmingly vivid and powerful rendering of a human being who outlived her life.” — The Nation

“Oates may have created the most important novel of her career.” — Newsday

“Ms. Oates has hit another one of her targets. This vengeful history is about the majesty of imagination. Marilyn’s self-imaginings were cruelly curtaied. Come now the artist to accord Marilyn her rightful status, as artist. The artist uses flesh and fact, the artist transcends them.” — New York Observer

“Blonde is a true mythic blowout, in which Marilyn is everything and nothing—a Great White Whale of significance, standing not for the blind power of nature but for the blind power of artifice.” — GQ

“Joyce Carol Oates takes the boldest path to comprehending ‘the riddle, the curse of Monroe’ by proceeding directly and frankly to fiction. Her novel Blonde is fat, messy and fierce. It’s part Gothic, part kaleidoscopic novel of ideas, part lurid celebrity potboiler, and is seldom less than engrossing.” — New York Times

“In Oates’ corpus, Blonde lands near the top. It is an ambitions, complex, and powerful novel.” — Greensboro News & Record

“If you are prejudiced against biographical fiction... or if you simply think that there are too many books about Marilyn Monroe... now is the time to lay aside your prejudices—or, rather, to allow them to be swept aside by a torrentially imaginative, compulsively readable tour de force... Blonde brings this near mythic tale triumphantly and terribly to psychological life.” — Sunday Telegraph

“Joyce Carol Oates’ precise and inspired writing is close to witchcraft. With mastery, she unravels the story of the mythical blonde, the overly adored and despised Marilyn Monroe. Breathlessly, I followed the intricate and passionate emotions surrounding the sweet and complex Norma Jeane, whose blazing ‘aura’ suffused the whole world and frightened the men who loved her most.” — Jeanne Moreau

“Oates is as diverse as she is driven. She has tackled topics ranging from the aesthetics of boxing to the misadventures of toxic twins. But rarely is she so intriguing as when she strays into a genre best described as ‘faction.’ It’s as unsettling as it is worthwhile to take a fresh look at a much-publicized event or personality through Oates’ eyes.” — Times Literary Supplement (London)