By Stuart Mitchner

In her introduction to the 20th Anniversary Edition of Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, literary critic Elaine Showalter calls it her “most ambitious novel,” in which she “uncannily channels” Marilyn Monroe’s “inner voice and demands that the star be given recognition, compassion, and respect.”

If you have ever fallen in love with Norma Jeane and Marilyn, the Girl and the Vision, it’s hard to believe that any mortal writer could produce such a book without exploiting so exploitable a human subject. But here the nature of exploitation is a given, like wind and rain, sun and shadow, and the book becomes a weather event driven by Oates’s gale force prose. There’s even an underground wind of sorts in one of the best-known images of the star, which Oates describes in Blonde and quotes from on her website Celestial Timepiece: “She’s standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating. Her blond head is thrown rapturously back as an updraft lifts her full, flaring skirt, exposing white cotton panties.” more