‘The Blondes’ by Emily Schultz

Reviewed by Elizabeth Bricknell

The Blondes is a reviewer’s nightmare. Doing it justice is nigh impossible, revealing any of the plot is an unfair spoiler to the reader and the author, and picking exemplary quotes is as difficult as ordering from a five-star restaurant.

Emily Schultz’s third novel (she has also published a poetry collection and is co-publisher of joylandmagazine.com) is a mesmerizing mishmash of The Stepford Wives, The Midwich Cuckoos and Night of the Living Dead. Blonde women—whether authentic or bleached—are turning into inventive, indiscriminate killers at an alarming pace. Our heroine is Hazel Hayes, a fortunately brunette PhD student (did you hear about the blonde with a PhD in Psychology? She’ll blow your mind, too). Throughout the novel, she is narrating the story to the unborn baby she calls Hazel Junior amongst dozens of other pet names, some detached, some adoring. The baby is the result of a liaison with Karl Mann, her married thesis advisor. So consistently hirsute is the plot that she even makes her decision to keep the baby while in a hairdresser’s chair, where she also chooses (wisely) to dye her hair a shade of red.

Hazel is living in Manhattan, but as a penniless student and soon-to-be single mother, she ponders returning to her Toronto hometown:

I could probably find employ back in Toronto, something dull but for which I was qualified: a job in media or arts, copywriting, maybe the CBC. God, how we all wanted to work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation! It was practically upper-middle-class welfare.

After the killings begin with abandon, Hazel knows she has no choice, and that she must return and inform Karl, a rather bland serial-cheating blackguard with a guilty conscience (“when Karl cried he blubbered like a hundred-and-seventy-pound baby”). Rather admirably, Schultz is sympathetic while portraying the mistress who is relentlessly hard on herself in her life choices and her looks (“Was there ever a female adulterer, or ‘other woman,’ who met a desirable fate?”), citing a laundry list of doomed heroines: Hester Prynne, Daisy Buchanan, Lara in Doctor Zhivago, Séverine in Belle de Jour, Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice,the songs of Nina Simone. She has done her homework and rightly pointed out the consistent injustice. Never once does one feel judgmental or anything but sympathy for Hazel Hayes, for like so many before her, she is teeming with self-loathing and blaming only herself for the ensuing mess of a tangoing twosome.

Even at the airport, the blonde stewardesses are after blood (“chunks of (the woman’s) scalp tore off in the flight attendant’s hands”…”one of the blondes made chase after a woman with a stroller who had started to run.”) She eventually finds sanctuary not in “Tronna” (“like something slick that you slip on walking down the street”) as the pandemic spreads through all the major cities, but in Wasaga Beach, where she has gone to find Karl’s cottage, and ends up with the woman who should have been her greatest adversary but for their mutual terror— his wife, Grace. Neither of them know if he is alive or dead, and they come to rely on each other with the reminder of his indiscretion burgeoning from maternity dresses Grace makes for her between fits of pique, jealousy, drunkenness and compassion.

The Blondes qualifies as a can’t-put-down in the vein of Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro’s extraordinary insight into the complex relationships between women and the comparative shallowness of their relationships with men. Hazel, despite all the insecurities of being young and worse, pregnant, comes to rely on herself with the clear-headedness only a mother in a war-zone can summon. Emily Schultz has created a twisted version of a world in chaos that is impressively original. She is a literary force to be reckoned with—and will forever make you think twice about telling a blonde joke.

Doubleday | 400 pages |  $29.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0385671057