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Review title: Even The Best Authors Can't Always Be Great
Product review: Oates is fond of taking iconic figures (Marilyn Monroe in Blonde) and watershed events in American history (Ted Kennedy's Chappaquiddick incident in Black Water; the Detroit riots in them) and novelising them. Usually Oates is dead-on in her re-workings of fact but in Blonde, she misses the mark. I know some people who read this long, stumbling book and liked it, but they were major fans of Monroe. Personally I found the story uninteresting, the message of tragedy and blame unworthy of the intricate genius of Oates, and the Marilyn of the novel less exploited and pre-programmed to failure, as Oates wished her to seem, and more of an annoying fool too hamstrung by her own inability to learn from mistakes to successfully manage her own ambitions. Joyce Carol Oates is still one of the greatest writers in American letters, but in Blonde she fails to deliver a work that meets her own lofty hopes for the ideas out of which it grew.
