Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates
The rented Toyota, driven with such impatient exuberance by The Senator, was speeding along the unpaved unnamed road, taking the turns in giddy skidding slides, and then, with no warning, somehow the car had gone off the road and had overturned in black rushing water, listing to its passenger's side, rapidly sinking.
Publication date: 1992
Edition: May 1992
Publisher: Dutton
# of pages: 154
Source: used, via amazon.de
A summary is easily given: Inspired by true events, Oates tells the story of a girl who meets an important politician she admires at a party, they hit it off, she agrees to drive to his hotel with him, they have an accident, she dies. The flap of my edition reads rather more pretentious:
"The Senator. The Girl. The Fourth of July party on the island. The ride through the night. The accident. The death by water.
Joyce Carol Oates has taken a shocking story that has become an American myth and, from it, has created a novel of electrifying power and illumination. The point of view is that of the girl herself, Kelly Kelleher. We enter her past and her present, her mind and her body, in a brilliantly woven narrative that transforms and transfigures this young woman fatally attracted to this older man, this hero, this father-figure, this soon-to-be lover. Kelly becomes the very embodiment of a woman's longing and vulnerability - at a party that takes on the quality of a surreal nightmare; in a car ride that we hope against hope will not end as we know it must end. Her voice echoes with the dimension of classic tragedy as she seems to speak for women drawn to the power that certain men command, drugged by the romantic dreams no matter how bright and brave these women may be.
Joyce Carol Oates is one of the acknowledged masters of American fiction. In Black Water, she has written her boldest and most brilliant novel yet. More than a roman à clef, more even than the tour de force it most certainly is, it parts the black water to reveal the the [sic] profoundest depth of human truth."
Let's get one thing out of the way: I know squat about Senator Ted Kennedy and the incident at Chappaquiddick that inspired this novella, apart from what I read on Wikipedia in preparation. I'd love it if someone who has the "right" cultural background would do an additional review, but I don't think that the novel stands and falls with background knowledge, either. This is also my first introduction to Joyce Carol Oates.
Anyway, this novella isn't for those among us who like a satisfying plot. Instead, Oates focuses on the final moments of Kelly Kelleher, fragments of her life, her psyche, the people that she knew and that influenced her, glimpses of her relationships to her parents, friends, men. Though inspired by and incident of 1969, the novella is firmly set in the early 90s, maybe the late 80s, with discussions of political themes, of the sort to be expected when political individuals meet, centering around key themes of the era.
Oates gives a voice to the innocent victim of the accident, the girl she names Kelly Kelleher. Her thoughts, while she is slowly dying, locked in the car under the black water that steadily rises, are what make this novella. Her life is flashing before her eyes, her problems - struggles with anorexia, with anxiety, her decision to finally make her life her own; her relationships - parents who adore their daughter, even when she develops into another direction, politically, than they would have liked, friends who are sometimes no more than rivals, men who tear her apart; her career; her life. We learn that she was a successful journalist, that she volunteered teaching illiterates to read and write. We learn of her as a person, instead of a name. We see her as a little girl who tries to justify her actions to her parents, and as the All American Girl she would like to be - but never as a woman, though this isn't extrapolated on enough to be a feminist commentary. To read this book from a feminist standpoint would, invariably, be painful: The way Kelleher, though lucid, never tries to free herself from the car she is trapped in, waiting, instead, for help to come, waiting for her man to save her, while the air slowly dissipates, makes me hope that she is simply too delirious, even in her moments of lucidity, too hurt to move, instead of actually just waiting for help and dying because of that. Not once does she try to free herself, all movement she makes is following the air she needs to wait on.
Other characters, party guests and friends, are present, but never fleshed out. Even The Senator as he is called throughout, remains an ideal, all critique of his actions remains between the lines, never voiced by Kelleher herself, half-imagined by the reader
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The style Oates uses reflects the inner turmoil of her protagonist. In her lucid moments, the prose is sparse and orderly, yet in moments of growing confusion, the prose slips, phrases merge into one another, until a final stream-of-consciousness crescendo of words describes delirious happiness in the last moments hallucinating freedom, but then ends with a bang, when Kelly, finally, actually dies. The sentence "As the black water filled her lungs, and she died" is repeated over and over, followed by "No", followed by another remembered scene, a ragged reflection. If you are a stickler for the proper use of the comma, this book is not for you. If you, on the other hand, enjoy experiments with language, it might just be. The prose reads in part like poetry, but in others just like the confused ramblings of a madwoman, which is apt enough, but hard to follow. Much use is made of repetition, scenes are first alluded to, then pages later fleshed out, then told once again from a slightly different perspective. Only once is the focus not Kelleher, when Oates describes how, instead of helping, as the former pages suggested, The Senator runs off to phone a friend with a fake story of how the accident came about, not even trying to save his passenger. Here, Oates plays very successfully with what is real, and what is imagined, what is remembered, and what is just wishful thinking.
So, in the end, my verdict is: This might be a perfect novel for the classroom environment, because you can teach students a lot about literary devices, and add some background research to spice things up, but for your average reader, there are a lot better introductions to psychological novels, stream of consciousness writing, and, I dare assume, the writing of Joyce Carol Oates, and I feel none the richer for having read Black Water, though it wasn't a chore, either. Definitely not a must read before you die, though, and if I had had a choice in which book by Oates I was to read first, this would definitely not have been it.