by Joyce Carol Oates
I had never heard of the Chappaquiddick Incident or Joyce Carol Oates before this book, and since the subject didn't really interest me it probably wasn't the best choice for me to read out of this author's sprawling literary bibliography. But while I was never enamored with the story being told, (a...
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 Chappaq...
This seems to be Oates attempt to tell a story purely of someone's life flashing before their eyes. It is loosely - and clearly - based on an incident that happened to a certain member of the Kennedys and a girl he was pursuing an affair with, but that's really neither here nor there. The novella ju...
Black Water is a haunting narrative of the final moments of Kelly Kelleher, a young woman whose impulsive decision to pursue her attraction to an older man leads to her death in a car accident. Kelleher, of course, is a stand-in for Mary Jo Kopechne, the young woman who lost her life in a car accide...
I've removed my rating for this book after Joyce Carol Oates wondered on Twitter if the murdered cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo committed "hate crimes." This is so deeply offensive as well as ... yes, hateful, that I'm unable to consider her writing apart from her statements.
Oates inexplicably squanders her gifts in this dream-like, stream-of-conscious exploration of a young woman’s state of mind, her attraction to a powerful older man, and her eventual doom. The writing is poetic, evocative, and certainly challenging – which is to be expected from a novelist of Oates’ ...
I found this totally engrossing. And fabulous. Sad and fabulous. Claustral. Cloistral. Intense. Recommended to the young and impressionable and those who have been young and impressionable. Joyce Carol Oates does such great work in picking through young women's minds. She does it again in the fat no...
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