Black Water

The summer of 1969--man walks on the moon, Hurricane Camille hits the Gulf Coast, and---Chappaquiddick. Those events have always been connected in my mind.

Blackwater recreates Mary Jo Kopechne's (here Kelly Kelleher) final minutes after the Senator abandons her to drown in the submerged car. This short book is repetitive and horrifying as it contrasts the idealistic and naive Kelly's carefree final day with her desparate final minutes. How long will she persist in to her hero-worship of the Senator, and her belief that he is coming to save her? My one complaint--Kelly and the Senator were not new characters--I simply saw Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne.

I believe in coincidence. Simply because I believe that people who don’t believe in coincidences are just explanation-happy and having problems fitting their minds around the fact that not everything happens for a reason. Maybe that makes me cynical. I’m not convinced I’m right, but that’s where my instincts lead me. But coincidences happen. This is one of them.

My last entry was a review of a book written by a family member about her brutal sexual assault and rape in 1988. Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates, the next step in my literary quest, is a book that, while no physical rape actually occurs, is absolutely rife with aggressive sexuality and misogynistic language. It’s the story of a young woman who meets a man only show more referred to as The Senator at a Fourth of July party. The action takes place all in one day, although the timeline continually drops, in a rather stomach-somersaulty way, into the past, and then hurtles you into a future that you only hope is true, yet in that same deep, dank place inside us, the same place in which I believe coincidences are just coincidences, you know that the future is just a happy dream. A happy dream, in which the present is the nightmare.

The style of the prose is, at first, confusing, until you realize that the narrator is the protagonist, Kelly Kelleher, and that the reader is being transported by her thoughts,which, like most of our thoughts are disjointed and often completely removed from reality. But it is this stream of consciousness that makes this novel so haunting, and so familiar.

At first, I thought that the main theme here was normality. What does it mean to be normal? What do normal people do? How do normal people think? Now this may be the overt theme of this book, and the reason that Kelly finds herself slowly drowning in the black water of the Maine marshes, but in my opinion, it’s not the important theme in this book.

It became apparent slowly, like turning the lights off in a dark room and slowly the objects in the room reappear as your eyes adjust. It started with what I saw as an interesting description of sexuality:

“You know how it is, basking in the glow of a sudden recognition, his eyes, your eyes, an ease like slipping into warm water, there’s the flawlessly beautiful woman who lies languorously sprawled as in a bed, long wavy red hair rippling out sensuously about her, perfect skin, heartbreak skin, lovely red mouth and a gown of some sumptuous gold lamé material clinging to breasts, belly, pubic area subtly defined by shimmering folds in the cloth, and The Lover stands erect and poised above her gazing down upon her his handsome darkish face not fully in focus, as the woman gazes up at him not required to smile in invitation, for she herself is the invitation, naked beneath the gold lamé gown, naked lifting her slender hips so subtly toward him, just the hint of it really, just the dream-suggestion of it really, otherwise the advertisement would be vulgar really…” (32).

I mean, isn’t that just the quintessential stereotype of what makes a woman attractive? Notice the indistinct face of the man. He could be any man. There is no other description of him, besides his “handsome darkish face.” The man doesn’t matter. He’s Everyman. But the woman (who, you’ll notice, also has no definable facial characteristics, nothing that would make her an individual) is the paragon of the slightly vulgar, woman-as-vessel, man-as-penetrator, sexual icon that women today still try to embody, and anything less can only be a failure. This description is bad enough, but slowly the novel’s language becomes more and more overtly sexual and misogynistic. Phrases like “thrust yourself up to the hilt, oh Christ” or scene descriptions like “in a shallow ditch…the headless naked body of a flesh-pink doll…the hole between the shoulders like a bizarre mutilated vagina where the head had been wrenched off” (149) are littered throughout the text. But it’s the protagonist, Kelly’s, attitude about her own survival and the man she’s with that is the most haunting.

When the Senator, who had a vodka tonic in hand while driving, sped around a hairpin turn on a dirt road and spun off into the black water, the speed of the impact crushed the passenger side of the car, essentially trapping Kelly in the quickly submerging vehicle. Little by little, we realize the extent of Kelly’s injuries. But that’s not the horrific part. In his struggle to get out of the car, the Senator violently wrenches himself out of the terrified grip of Kelly, actually kicking her in the head in his frenzy to escape the Toyota turned death trap. And still, as the car slowly fills with water, Kelly is convinced that he’s coming back to save her. For every minute that goes by, she reinvents her story so that she doesn’t have to admit that he’s not coming back. As she fades in and out of consciousness, she goes over the events of the day again and again, constantly reminding herself that He chose Her out of all the other girls at the party. Until the moment she finally succumbs to the water in her lungs, she has to believe that he is coming back to her, to save her.

The only time in the whole book where we, the reader, are removed from Kelly’s interior monologue is when we see the Senator escape from the car and find a phone. Now, we’re in the Senator’s head, and there are no noble intentions, no humane desire to save the woman that he put in danger in the first place. Instead, there are only fears of what this will do his political reputation, whether this will bar him from ever being voted President of the United States. So he calls his friend who was at the party and says that the girl was drunk, the girl grabbed the wheel, the girl drove the car into the water. This is the part that really drove home the story’s similarity to rape: the transference of blame from the guilty person to the victim. Kelly made herself available to this man, this man that “chose” her, even remarking to herself that “I’ve made you want me, now I can’t refuse you” (115). And he threw her away. He used her for his own gain and then abandoned her to her fate, even using her as a means for his own survival, at the expense of hers.

I wish I could say that the real world is a different place from the world that this story takes place in. I wish I could say that women no longer make themselves the sexual playthings of men, and then allow these men to throw them away. I wish politics was really about making the world a better place, instead of about shifting guilt and blame around, like an anorexic does with the food on her plate to make it look like she’s doing what she should be. I wish a lot of things, but wishing isn’t being. This is why fiction is important. It’s not facts, it’s not a timeline, but it chronicles the things that cold indifference never could. It brings unpleasant truths into the light. And bringing them into the light is one step towards changing them.

For more book reviews (err... book musings?), including a mid-winter 4th of July fête, visit my blog For Love and Allegory at http://www.forloveandallegory.wordpress.com/ show less

When this book was first published in 1992, I was aware of it but afraid to read it. I thought a fictionalized retelling of the Chappaquiddick incident, including a detailed description of the heroine's agonizing death by drowning, would be too much for me. But now I have read this short novel--it took less than a day-- and I found it to be very well done.

The story has been moved from 1969 to the early 1990s. Kelly (the Mary Jo Kopechne stand in) meets the prominent figure known only as The Senator at an upper-crust Fourth of July party. Amazed that she has attracted the great man's attention, she agrees to get into his car with him, even though she knows he's been drinking all day. When the inevitable happens, Kelly doesn't realize, show more although the reader does, that the Senator will betray her in a misguided effort to keep his presidential hopes alive.

Oates skillfully moves the narrative between Kelly's past, the party she has just left, and her horrifying wait the in the Senator's submerged vehicle. This sad but artful story is highly recommended, if you are in the mood for this type of thing. show less

[Black Water] presents the life of a young woman as she re-experiences it in her dying moments. It's an interesting challenge for a writer. Kelly Kelleher is at an Independence Day party thrown by a friend, Buffy St. John, at Buffy's parents summer place on an island off the coast of Maine. A revered U.S. Senator appears as a surprise guest. Kelly is quite enthralled by him, and he seems to be taken with her. Though she's expecting to stay the night, The Senator, as he is referred to throughout the story, persuades her to take the ferry to the mainland with him. He has a room in a motel. Racing to the ferry, The Senator turns onto an unmarked gravel road, assuring Kelly it's a shortcut. But he's racing to the ferry, and he misjudges a show more turn, and their car plunges off a narrow bridge into a tidal channel.

You know the story, of course, because it's based on a 1969 accident in which a car driven by Senator Ted Kennedy plunged off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, drowning his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne.

Rather than re-adjudicate that incident, author Joyce Carol Oates explores the thoughts of a young woman as she drowns. Her upbringing, her relationship with her parents (what will they think of her now?), her Catholic education, her jobs. Each vignette fades into her immediate peril: "As the black water rose around her, to fill her lungs." She's re-living her life, her friendship with Buffy, her past romances, her surprise that The Senator is attracted to her. As the car sinks into the stinking black water, Kelly tries to escape, grapples with The Senator as he too struggles to escape, then pleads to him to come back for her.

"She could hear him … somewhere above. The surface of the water was close above. There he moved cautiously in the shallows, he was diving, swimming to save her where she was trapped in the dark so she must guide him I'm here I'm here I'M HERE."

Excellent short book. It was a finalist for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize. I'll give it at least one thumb up. show less

This novella definitely packs a punch. It is obviously a retelling of the famous scandal surrounding Ted Kennedy's car accident where he drove his car off a bridge with a female passenger inside, escaped, and didn't call the police until the next morning. The passenger, of course, died. Apparently there is quite a bit of controversy about what really happened (I missed this as it happened before I was born) but Oates skips most of the controversy and keeps the focus on Kelly, the passenger. The book is told almost completely from the Kelly's point of view as she drowns in the car. It's dramatic - time flying back and forth, hallucinations vs. memories vs. her present of drowning - and short. Oates could have chosen to make this a long show more novel, delving into The Senator's motivations for leaving this woman to die, presenting more background and aftermath, but instead she keeps the focus on the mind of Kelly as she slowly loses air and drowns. This is a powerful and haunting book.

Black Water was my first foray into the dozens of book Oates has written. I was impressed by it and will continue dipping into her vast array of books. show less

I found this a very effective and affecting novella inspired by the Chappaquiddick/Ted Kennedy incident of the 1970s. The story, such as it is - much of it is a stream of consciousness narrative - is told from the young woman's perpective as she is trapped in the car after it goes off the road and into the water. There is a rhythm to the narrative not unlike that of lapping water and it added to the intense experience of the read.

It is a beautifully written, haunting, fictionalization of the Chappaquiddick Incident. Kelly Kelleher meets The Senator at a July 4 party and accepts a ride with him that ends in tragedy. The entire novella is written as the disjointed, often repetitive stream of thoughts that flow through Kelly's mind as she dies. Each chapter repeats some information, often word-for-word, and adds new elements to create a clearer picture of Kelly and her life, particularly her experience on the day of the accident. Oates uses sparse punctuation and repetition to give flow and urgency to Kelly's internal story:

And how unexpectedly sweet he'd been to her. Kelly Kelleher. So radiant and assured there on the beach, wearing her new glamorously dark show more sunglasses the lenses scientifically treated to eliminate ultraviolet rays, and she knew she looked good, she was not a beautiful girl but sometimes you know, it's your time and you know, no happiness quite like that happiness.

She was bargaining yes all right she would trade her right leg, even both her legs if they thought it necessary, the emergency rescue team, yes amputate, all right please go ahead, please just do it she would sign the release later, she promised not to sue.

Gripping and wrenching, this story that we want to end differently even though we know from the start where we will finish. It is the telling that made me keep reading, the beautiful language and its relentless flow. This book is one that I will think of as "real literature," and not just popular fiction. Highly recommended. show less