Black Water

Just through with Black Water (1992) by Joyce Carol Oates. A novel of about 150 pages, that is also a serious critical comment on US politics and life. The novel was very refreshing after some of the recent fiction I had read, and I found myself wondering exactly what was refreshing about it, apart from of course the style of writing that held suspense, by going into the past, through repetition and so on. Perhaps what was refreshing was that the Senator (in this novel with whom a 26 year old girl drives a car as passenger and is drowned to death because of his drunk-driving) simply replaces the grey of recent novels to actual black!

The Senator does not dive back into the water to his submerged car where Kelly (the 26 year old) is stuck, because he cannot bring himself to swim about in the dirty sewage water. Later of course, he would tell everyone that it was the girl who was drunk-driving and it takes him 40 minutes or more to call for help on the deserted road of an island, throughout which time we traverse with Kelly as she goes from stages of denial of the situation, to optimism, to bidding goodbyes to parents and grandmother and to their visions, to her casual rehearsal of how all of this might be narrativized after her rescue. Carol Oates surely seems to be a master in writing in a style that retains the crispness of short stories.

After reading Black Water, I felt that it might be quite difficult for our generation to represent black. Especially after all the grey the literary world saw with Roy's The God of Small Things.

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