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Summary
Summary
The Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel from the author of the New York Times bestselling novel We Were the Mulvaneys
"Its power of evocation is remarkable." -- The New Yorker
In the midst of a long summer on Grayling Island, Maine, twenty-six-year-old Kelly Kelleher longs for something interesting to happen to her--something that will make her finally feel some of what she imagines other people must feel when they watch the fireworks explode off the beach. So when Kelly meets The Senator at an exclusive party and he asks her to go back to a hotel room on the main island with him, she says yes. Even though the senator is old enough to be her father, even though he has perhaps been drinking too heavily to get behind the wheel, the danger of saying yes is an inevitable and even exciting part of the adventure Kelly is finally going to have.
However, as The Senator's car whips around the island's roads and eventually crashes through a guardrail, it becomes clear to Kelly and the reader that this man embodies a wholly different and more sinister type of danger, one much larger and harder to contain than the horrible events that unfold as Kelly is left in the sinking car. Black Water is a chilling meditation on power, trust, and violation and a timeless classic from one of America's foremost storytellers.
Author Notes
Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Syracuse University and a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin.
She is the author of numerous novels and collections of short stories. Her works include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Bellefleur, You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, Because It Is My Heart, Solstice, Marya : A Life, and Give Me Your Heart. She has received numerous awards including the National Book Award for Them, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature. She was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her title Lovely, Dark, Deep. She also wrote a series of suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. In 2015, her novel The Accursed became listed as a bestseller on the iBooks chart.
She worked as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, before becoming the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She and her late husband Raymond J. Smith operated a small press and published a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
``You would not choose to drown, to die . . . trapped together in a sinking car, with a stranger,'' a narrator observes about the fate of Kelly Kelleher, heroine of Oates's ( Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart ) gripping and hallucinatory novella. In a plot shocking for its blatant familiarity, a figure identified as The Senator tipsily drives a young woman away from a Fourth of July party, veers off a dock and plunges the car into dank water, where he deserts her and she drowns, a chastely wrapped condom still in her Laura Ashley purse. Brief chapters, some taut as prose poems, sink into Kelly's past (she had hoped to help him campaign for the presidency) and then surge forward. Ebbing and rising like the engulfing waters, the narrative, too, swallows her in its finale. Returning to the theme of Death and the Maiden (the picture hangs on a wall in American Appetites , and the phrase was the original title of her classic short story ``Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?''), Oates here extracts a deeper, more terrible meaning. Kelly feels ``chosen,'' having long ago fallen under the sway of Politics and Eros as incarnated by the treacherous Senator, on whom she based her college honors thesis. The author chillingly augments her scrutiny of the tainted American official by incorporating statements about capital punishment by current legalists. Oates is at the top of her stunning form. 50,000 first printing; BOMC selection; author tour. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Oates displays her penchant for morbidity and command of suspense in her latest taut chiller, which rouses the ghost of Chappaquiddick. Her relentless and luridly imagined fictionalization of the tragedy is set in the present and told from the victim's perspective. Kelly, a 26-year-old political journalist, meets "The Senator" at a Fourth of July party on a marshy island off the coast of Maine. Ordinarily reserved and cautious, she impulsively agrees to leave with him, seduced as much by his physical power as by his fame. Oates describes the fatal accident over and over again, like an instant replay gone mad. Each time, she embellishes the horror of being trapped in a smashed-up car beneath the surface of the black, "evil muck-water" with freshly terrifying details. As Kelly struggles to keep breathing, she clings to the belief that the senator, who added to her injuries as he fiercely kicked his way free, will return to save her. Classically, her life flashes before her eyes so that we get to know her as she dies. As wrenching a death scene as this is, the depiction of a man blindly intent on saving his life and future is just as appalling. A flinty choice of topics this political year and hard on the heels of the William Kennedy Smith trial, this is Oates at her most facile and provocative. (Reviewed Feb. 15, 1992)0525934553Donna Seaman
School Library Journal Review
YA-- ``She was the one he had chosen.'' This is Kelly Kelleher's thought as she leaves the party with a senator, as much a symbol of her desire to change her life as it is the fulfillment of a romantic dream. She's a young woman struggling to assert herself, but this rash move ultimately ends in tragedy. Oates makes readers feel that they are along for the very frightening ride in the car with Kelly and her senator in this shocking, all-too-familiar story. It's fast paced, almost as if to compel readers to keep up with the speeding car. Although brief, the book develops Kelly's character so well that the loss of such a young and promising life is deeply felt. The man sharing the last moments of her life is known only as ``The Senator'' throughout. Even for readers unaware of the true incident that was catalyst for this story, the novel stands strongly on its own . -- Carolyn Koehler, Richard Byrd Library, Fairfax County, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Oates's latest is an impassioned re-creation of the tragedy at Chappaquiddick--with names withheld and the date moved to the current, post-Reagan era. Her name is Elizabeth Kelleher, called ``Kelly'' by her friends; her age, 26 and eight months; occupation, reporter for the liberal Citizen's Inquiry, whose editor once worked on the Bobby Kennedy campaign. Pretty, tentative Kelly attends casually and without expectations the Fourth of July get-together hosted by her best friend, Buffy St. John, on Grayling Island--little realizing that ``the Senator''--charismatic liberal politician, contender for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, and subject of her senior thesis at Brown--will drop in for a few drinks and a game or two of tennis. The Senator, red-eyed, heavy, and in his late 50s, looks the political warhorse he is, but it's his appetite for debate, politics, and life itself that intrigues the young journalist--he is, after all, her hero. She allows him to lead her on a walk along the beach, to kiss her, to suggest that they catch the ferry off the island and have dinner at his hotel. She is the one, the one he's chosen, Kelly tells herself, frightened though she is as the Senator speeds down a dark, unpaved road toward the ferry, sloshing a fresh gin-and-tonic on her dress. But when his car flips off the road and into the black, polluted Indian River, Kelly gradually realizes that her assumption is false: she isn't chosen, at least not for rescue--and her brief life, with its half- understood longings, fears, and dreams, is over almost before it has begun. One may question whether yet another fictional account, no matter how brief and evocative, of this infamous accident is really worthwhile--though Oates fans (and there are many) won't be disappointed.
Library Journal Review
It all began when Kelly Kelleher was introduced to The Senator, a man she had wanted to meet since selecting him as the topic of her senior honors thesis. Charmed and infatuated, Kelly eagerly accepts his invitation to leave the island party where they've met and ride back to Boothbay Harbor together on the late night ferry. Those who remember Chappaquiddick can predict Kelly's ultimate fate, but certainly not the horrors she must have suffered strapped to the seat of a car that would become an aqueous death chamber. Immense courage shines through the tangled streams of her thoughts, memories, and hallucinations. As witnesses to her plight, we can only keep vigil as she drifts in and out of consciousness, waiting for the reprieve that surely must be hers. Oates brilliantly redefines the meanings of guilt and innocence, vengeance and reward in this thought-provoking allegory of our life and times. Highly recommended for all fiction collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/92.-- Janet W. Reit, Univ. of Vermont Lib., Burlington (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
