In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song; Jerzy: A Novel; and A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century. Among other honors, his work has been longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and PEN Award for Biography, shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and selected as a finalist for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Film Culture at the American University of Paris, Charyn has also been named a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Manhattan.
[The Page 69 Test: Under the Eye of God; My Book, The Movie: Big Red; Q&A with Jerome Charyn; The Page 69 Test: Ravage & Son; Writers Read: Jerome Charyn (August 2023); My Book, The Movie: Maria La Divina]
At Lit Hub Charyn tagged "five of [his] favorite books about the lives of divas." One title on the list:
Joyce Carol Oates, BlondeRead about the other entries on the list at Lit Hub.
Joyce Carol Oates sees the Blonde, about the life of Norma Jeane Baker aka Marilyn Monroe, as her very own “Moby Dick,” as she grapples with the WhiteWhale of American history, while the novel weaves across the twentieth century, with the reinvention of Jack Kennedy as the Prince and Joe DiMaggio, Norma Jeane’s second husband, as the Ex-Athlete, among a trove of other characters. There’s a rage in Oates as she relates how Norma Jeane was mistreated by powerful men, including Mr. Z, Darryl Zanuck, who rapes her during their first encounter and remains her studio boss throughout the early part of her career.
We can almost feel Oates inside Norma Jeane’s flesh, as if there were a kind of echolalia throughout the novel, a mixture of maddening voices that captures what is inside Norma Jeane’s head. And Oates has accomplished a miracle; she has made Marilyn a diva and an anti-diva at the same time, someone who ripped at her own fame.
When I recently asked Oates whether she felt that she had become Norma Jeane as she worked on the novel, she answered yes—“it was a gradual, then something like a total immersion for months of increasing intensity. I did feel this was the deeper, more inward & perhaps secret—certainly unarticulated—Norma Jeane that the world rarely saw . . . I had wanted to write about ‘Marilyn Monroe’ impacting strangers’ lives—having meaning to their lives while her own life was in free fall—the irony of being an Icon for others, while helpless & doomed herself.”
Blonde also appears among Nathan Smith's seven top Marilyn Monroe books, Rose Tremain's six best books, John O’Farrell's top ten celebrity appearances in fiction, Michel Schneider's top ten books on Marilyn Monroe, Ron Hansen's five best literary tales of real-life crimes, and Janet Fitch's book list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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