Joyce Carol Oates knows what it's like to be 'Blonde'

Joyce Carol Oates

April 27, 2000
Web posted at: 5:10 p.m. EST (2110 GMT)

(CNN) -- Joyce Carol Oates has written 40 novels, so she's familiar with that breed of human known as "the book critic."

But if she had forgotten, her latest work, "Blonde" (Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins), is serving as a re-introduction. Oates' 738-page novel dares to reinvent the life of Hollywood's tragic starlet, Marilyn Monroe, by giving a quasi-fictional account of her life, through her eyes. While some reviewers have praised the work, it has received its share of criticism.

In particular, New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani calls it "fat, messy" and "the book equivalent of a tacky television mini-series."

But words like this don't seem to bother Oates; she claims to know why her work is attacked. Critics, she believes, still haven't come to accept the female novelist who ignores structural borders.

"When I first began publishing, I was writing short stories and novels about subjects that only men were writing about -- violence and men's lives," Oates, 62, says. "So I did take a good deal of criticism in the 1960s because I guess I violated that taboo. And I think looking back on my career, I have only myself to blame.

"I think," she continues, "if I had written under a pseudonym -- my first stories were published as J.C. Oates -- maybe it would have been better to stay with that so I wasn't identified with being a woman. Because to write a long novel like 'Blonde,' which is an experimental novel, it's just something that women don't do in this country and critics basically are not able to accept a woman writing that way.

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"So when I look back over my career, I think in a way I might have made mistake to write as a woman," she says.

It's more a fleeting thought than a serious consideration of her career direction. Oates' fans surely can't picture the author hiding her sex behind initials, just as most Americans still can't quite grasp how Norma Jeane Baker, a brown-haired innocent, transformed herself into a platinum blonde sex symbol of the silver screen, only to suffer an early death at age 36.

Oates feels both she and Monroe have been misunderstood -- and that's what attracted the author to the actress. In "Blonde," she hopes she can set straight the dumb-blonde stereotypes that hounded Monroe, even if it is just fiction.

"I feel that in my novel I'm trying to re-address that imbalance and allow people to see that Norma Jeane was quite sensitive and intelligent," Oates says. "She read a great deal, she tried to write poetry. She was hoping to be a serious actress. But in a sense, it was too late because the American public just wanted the stereotype from her."

The book is not a biography, Oates makes clear in the preface. But she did read three biographies ("Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe," "Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe," and "Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress") as well as watch all of Monroe's movies on video during her research.

Oates invents conversations, meetings, poetry, and mixes them with real events, people and facts.

The book, in fact, has received criticism for leaving out certain figures in Monroe's life, or just referring to them by initials or names like "the ex-Athlete" (Joe DiMaggio) or "the President" (guess who?).

"I don't think Marilyn Monroe knew John Kennedy very well," she says in defense. "She would know a man who was the President."

Most of the criticism, she says, is based on false notions of what the book should accomplish.

"I think people were angry that I would write a book that seemed not to be literal," she says. "I mean, I haven't read every review that's been published. But I think there's a confusion in this country that if you're writing a historical novel that you have to have everything literal.

"But in other parts of the world," she says, "it's understood that a novelist like Guenter Grass can write a historical novel and have a lot of fiction in it. But the level of criticism in this country is just not up to European and English standards."

Oates is perhaps one of a few American authors who would make a comment like this with offhand flair. She is, after all, the winner of numerous honors, including the National Book Award for her 1969 novel "them," and a professor at Princeton University.

She is keenly aware of her place in American letters.

"When I started writing, I never anticipated I would have had a serious, long career," she says. "And now in some quarters I'm considered a major American writer."

Still, there are the critics, and the idea that if she had written under a pseudonym, things might be a little different.

"I don't want to sound critical of men," she says, "but it's been very difficult to be a woman writer with all this sentiment and prejudice against a woman. But I'm not complaining. I've had a nice career and I haven't done badly, considering."

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