Once again the National Book Awards are a disaster zone of PC nonsense. The two frontrunners for the fiction award this year were Susan Sontag's In America and Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde . Like her novel The Volcano Lover , In America weaves a skein of turgid prose around a tiresome female character. Oates's novel Blonde is, by contrast, a fearlessly expressionistic investigation of Marilyn Monroe as a cultural phenomenon, as a woman, a sex symbol and as a complex narrative.
Oates is among our most prolific and intelligent American novelists.
Blonde , a splendid departure from the famous Oatsian realism, is her best book in ten years and far superior to Sontag's communist drivel. But none of this has anything to do with winning or losing the National Book Award. Sontag has spent the last decade defending Clinton's interventions in Serbia, Bosnia, Somalia, and giving us the essay, AIDS and Its Metaphors . We long for the time when her Notes on Camp made her Norman Mailer's rival as America's public intellectual. But she knows which company to keep and whom to flatter.