Black Water
Oates, Joyce Carol
The book plays like one of those reallife-but-with-actors scenes on "A Current Affair" or "Hard Copy." A woman in her twenties meets a U.S. senator at a party and goes for a drive with him. He...
...B lack Water begins with the car going off the bridge into the water and then stays firmly within its heroine's head, as she flashes back through the events of the fatal day and her relations with men, from her father (who is a fascist) through her serious boyfriend (who done her wrong) to the senator (her longtime idol...
...71 BLACK WATER Joyce Carol Oates E. P. Dutton/154 pages/$17 reviewed by JOHN PODHORETZ 60 The American Spectator July 1992...
...In breathless run-on sentences that are intended to give the book urgency but just leave it sounding hysterical, she fills us in on Kelly's life—complete with eating disorder—in a psychological portrait that, for sheer insight, rivals a Cosmopolitan quiz...
...He drives off a bridge, the car ends up in the water,and she drowns while he escapes...
...Oates wants to show how the desperate desire of American girls to be loved leads them to be victimized instead at the hands of men...
...But that is the extent of the dramatic license she takes...
...But while that may be the author's intention, ultimately Black Water is merely a garish exploitation of a genuine American political outrage...
...Oates has no real interest in why, after two decades, Chappaquiddick remains a national obsession—in how his family's celebrity, money, and power led Teddy Kennedy to the appallingly correct assumption that he could do just about anything and get away with it...
...Oates does change a few things—the story is updated to last year from 1969, it all takes place in Maine instead of Martha's Vineyard, the woman's name is Kelly Kelleher instead of Mary Jo Kopechne, and the senator is simply an important politician and not a member of America's most fatally glamorous family...
...True to bathetic form, Oates takes ghoulish glee in her descriptions of how Kelly has been made immobile by the buckling of the car's roof, how she desperately tries to keep her head in an air pocket as water fills the car, how she doesn't know whether she is right side up or upside down, and how the water tastes of oil and sewage...
...Speaking on behalf of all males, I resent being compared to Teddy Kennedy, even metaphorically...
...Oates has turned Teddy Kennedy, that exceptional symbol of evil, into an Everyman for man-haters...
...Kelly keeps thinking, in the florid, cliché-ridden prose that is Oates's stock in trade...
...Am I going to die—like this...
Vol. 25 • July 1992 • No. 7
