Thirty-five years after her death, Marilyn Monroe lives, and dies, again in this collection of 21 new stories. Although only Eileen Dreyer acknowledges that ``I'm not as interested in Marilyn Monroe as I am in the image of Marilyn Monroe,'' the same is equally true of all the contributors here, because Monroe's life and personality have been so relentlessly mythologized over the years that even attempts to get at the real Monroe behind the breathlessly seductive image end up settling for a remarkably homogenous set of ``real'' myths. Whether she's hiring a shamus at the dawn of her career (Martin and Annette Meyers), rescuing Khrushchev from assassination (Barbara Collins), scanning her horoscopes for the weekend of her death (J.N. Williamson), conversing with the death angel (Billie Sue Mosiman), joining forces with a mother-daughter pair of thieves (T.J. MacGregor), telling a medium about her abused childhood (Melissa Mia Hall), or bearing John Kennedy's love-child (Peter Crowther and editor Douglas, though there are broad hints in many more stories and a neat twist on the theme by Jill M. Morgan), Norma Jeane Mortenson is monotonously wise, sensitive, professional, well-read, vulnerable, and a sucker for kids. It's frustrating to see a myth turned inside-out so often in such banal terms. The most successful stories are those that use Monroe's myth instead of trying to get beyond it by putting Monroe on 165th Street (Linda Mannheim) or in the underworld (Elizabeth Ann Scarborough) or a drag queen's arms (Janet Berliner and George Guthridge). Fortunately, the two most ambitious stories, Carolyn Wheat's kaleidoscopic account of filming Some Like It Hot and Nancy Pickard's fable about the week that Monroe's healing image miraculously appeared on Mt. Rushmore, are also the best. Douglas (Cat With an Emerald Eye, 1996, etc.) provides waves of delight for Monroephiles, though there's not much illumination deeper than Gloria Steinem's neo-feminist analysis.
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-85737-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.
Hailed as heroes on a stateside tour before returning to Iraq, Bravo Squad discovers just what it has been fighting for.
Though the shellshocked humor will likely conjure comparisons with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, the debut novel by Fountain (following his story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, 2006) focuses even more on the cross-promotional media monster that America has become than it does on the absurdities of war. The entire novel takes place over a single Thanksgiving Day, when the eight soldiers (with their memories of the two who didn’t make it) find themselves at the promotional center of an all-American extravaganza, a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys football game. Providing the novel with its moral compass is protagonist Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old virgin from small-town Texas who has been inflated into some kind of cross between John Wayne and Audie Murphy for his role in a rescue mission documented by an embedded Fox News camera. In two days, the Pentagon-sponsored “Victory Tour” will end and Bravo will return to the business as usual of war. In the meantime, they are dealing with a producer trying to negotiate a film deal (“Think Rocky meets Platoon,” though Hilary Swank is rumored to be attached), glad-handing with the corporate elite of Cowboy fandom (and ownership), and suffering collateral damage during a halftime spectacle with Beyoncé. Over the course of this long, alcohol-fueled day, Billy finds himself torn, as he falls in love (and lust) with a devout Christian cheerleader and listens to his sister try to persuade him that he has done his duty and should refuse to go back. As “Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives,” Billy and his foxhole brethren discover treachery and betrayal beyond anything they’ve experienced on the battlefield.
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-088559-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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