Black Water

I'm always dubious about "post-modern" style, but here Oates uses it to bring out the most cutting edge of her parodic voice. Yes, we know that the middle-aged masculine senator is going to let us down in the end; but the brilliance of this poem novel is in showing us the failure on the feminine side. For all her rebellion and education, the young woman can't escape her culture and falls to the need to please another father figure. ( )

Publisher's note in the book: "This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously."

Black Water is a fictional re-telling of the Chappaquiddick incident of 1969 which became a great national scandal. For those of you unfamiliar, there is a very detailed wikipedia article on the subject. Everything has been changed - the setting, the physical attributes of the Senator, the car used...etc. - but the story is there in its essence and told by a narrator from the viewpoint of Kelly Kelleher, the victim who drowned in the overturned car that the Senator was driving drunk. Once I got past the impulse to compare details with what I knew of the actual incident, I found the story haunting and often mesmerizing. The narrative alternates between back story and flashes - sometimes lyrical - of the actual crash and the last few hours of its victim. The was not exactly what I expected - an outright indictment of the Senator for all of his failures (although it is surely implied) - there are more fundamental truths, a much broader indictment, that Oates is getting to through this novella - and that, I think, is something left for you to discover on your own.

(first posted 3/2012 elsewhere on LT) ( )

In July of 1969, a car drove off a bridge into the tidal waters of Chappaquiddick in Massachusetts--taking the life of Mary Jo Kopechne and with it the presidential aspirations of Senator Ted Kennedy. A blurb on the back of Black Water from the Los Angeles Times calls the book "the ballad of Chappaquiddick" and even though the internal chronology places this after 1990, in Maine not Massachusetts, the young woman involved is named "Kelly Kelleher" and the driver involved is only called "the Senator" this is obviously a roman à clef based on that incident. So you have a tragic event with lots of resonance for Americans and by a celebrated author who has won the National Book Award and been a Pulitzer Prize Finalist. So this book should be amazing--but I don't feel it is.

I think this is just an author who is a mismatch for me stylistically. I had tried before this her We Were the Mulvaneys and found myself underwhelmed. This particular book left me decidedly unmoved and even feeling some distaste. I think a lot of that is because I could see the seams of her modernist techniques too well. There are chapters of less than 100 words, staccato sentences, sentences without punctuation, ones with unending lists, run-ons, constant looping back to moments during the accident between narrating events earlier in the day and in Kelly's life, and repeated phrases such as "Am I going to die? Like this?" and "And the black water filled her lungs." I recently read a book by Salman Rushdie using such modernist techniques and was charmed--it just worked. Here the literary techniques seemed stagey, and given the real life tragedy depicted within living memory that made this come across to me as exploitative and cheesy. Still, this might make a good introduction to Oates, to see if you might like her style. It's very short, only 154 pages and with a stripped down enough style you could read it in a couple of hours. ( )

*warning, small spoilers enclosed*

It picked this up on a whim at the UBS last week. This was my third book by Oates; the firsts being The Falls and First Love. As with First Love, this felt more like an experiment with words, with sentences, with feelings and emotions, than just telling a story. I assume, from what I've read of Oates, that this is typical of her work and I just drink it up. I read this in less than twenty-four hours.

The main character, a young woman named Kelly Kelleher, is going through the final moments of her life. To me, this felt like how they say the last moments of your life are; the "your life flashing before your eyes" so to speak. An accident occurs, and as each chapter unfolds Kelly's mind flashes back and forth from her currect situation, earlier in that day, and even as far back as her childhood. The writing mimics how I imagine your thoughts do at that time; disjointed, tricky and confusing.

This was a tough, gripping, creepy read. I was already scared of drowning, it's aways been one of "those" fears I've had; now I'm terrified of it. Oates is so brilliant a writer though, that I just couldn't put it down. Can't wait to read more by her. ( )

Probably the most unpleasant reading experience of my adult life. Over and over throughout the book, the refrain recurs: "And the black water filled her lungs, and she died". Of course the "she" in the story is the young woman who died in an accident in a car driven by the (now deceased) United States Senator Ted Kennedy, back in 1969. That was over four decades ago, and nearly a quarter century before Ms. Oates turned the accident into this dismal, ugly novella. It's time to move on.

PS. For the record, the water surrounding Chappaquidick Island isn't black or swampy, it is clear, pristine seawater like that of the Caribbean. ( )