Oates' `Black Water': The Depths Of Deceit

-- Joyce Carol Oates will read from "Black Water" tonight at 7:30 at the Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S. Main St. Check with the bookstore (624-6600) on the availability of free tickets.

There is a point near the middle of Joyce Carol Oates' slim new novel when politics and sexual desire are shown to be identical sides of the same shiny coin: "Politics, the negotiating of power. Eros, the negotiating of power," declares the cozy narrative voice.

The equation between sex, politics and power lies even closer to the moral and psychological center of "Black Water" (William Abrahams/Dutton, $17) than it is does to the book's physical center. More than anything, Oates' novella is a meditation on the complex weave of physical attraction, celebrity and political power - and the uneasy place among them claimed by women in the 1990s.

These concerns are summed up in a single word, though the word won't be found anywhere in 154 pages of text: Chappaquiddick.

The tragic story of the 1969 automobile accident that claimed the life of a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne and crippled the political aspirations of Sen. Edward Kennedy is the unavoidable subtext of Oates' gripping, hallucinatory tale. She doesn't shy away from the comparison.

"I wrote it last summer in a fairly intense period," said the soft-spoken writer and Princeton professor, shortly after arriving in Seattle yesterday for a reading tonight. "But it is based on ideas I have had since Chappaquiddick - I had such a strong sense of identity with Mary Jo Kopechne . . . I became very mesmerized by the situation."

Oates, a prolific novelist whose many honors include the National Book Award, said the Chappaquiddick incident - in which a car driven by Kennedy ran off a small bridge on the Massachusetts island, fatally trapping his passenger, Kopechne, underwater - had been among the many ideas and story fragments submerged in her notebooks for years. Recent events brought it to the surface.

"Last summer, I was stimulated by the William Kennedy Smith rape trial and by the resignation of (Supreme Court Justice) Thurgood Marshall," Oates said. "It all seemed to signal the end of an era - and to signal the beginning of a very hard time for women."

More than anything, "Black Water" gives voice to the one human being forever silenced by the real-life accident, the character at the heart of the sad drama who was completely overlooked in the sparring between reporters, police, court officials and the battery of lawyers who rushed to Kennedy's defense more than two decades ago. Through the character of Kelly Kelleher, an idealistic 26-year-old gofer and sometime writer for a liberal magazine of dwindling circulation, Oates has imagined all that might have flashed through Mary Jo Kopechne's mind at the end; it is a startling, persuasive attempt to fully appreciate her sudden, immense fear and sorrow.

The time is today, just after the Persian Gulf War, and Kelly is a Fourth of July guest at the Grayling Island, Maine, summer home of the parents of her old college friend, Buffy St. John. Though Buffy's parents are away, the women and other friends plan a holiday party to which Buffy's lover, a much-older Washington politico, has invited his longtime friend, identified only as "The Senator."

Kelly, who wrote her honors thesis at Brown on this very politician ("Jeffersonian Idealism and `New Deal' Pragmatism: Liberal Strategies in Crisis"), is entranced when The Senator, to everyone's surprise, actually shows up in a rented Toyota, having taken the ferry from nearby Boothbay Harbor. Separated from his wife, he arrives "loose-jointed and peppy as a kid . . . a man in his mid-fifties who had the fatty-muscled body of a former athlete."

During the "celebratory and careless" afternoon, there are sparks of attraction between Kelly and The Senator. He even kisses her on the beach, and - a number of hours and many drinks later - he departs with her for his motel in Boothbay Harbor. Kelly knows he has had too much to drink, yet she claims her right to go against her own better judgment - sadly, ironically, because "if I don't do as he asks there won't be any later."

The inevitable accident happens. In short scenes that loop hypnotically through reality, memory and hallucination, Oates captures Kelly's futile last hopes and The Senator's panicky "strategy in crisis." Finally, almost mercifully, the black water claims her.

"Young women are very romantic and hopeful," said Oates, observing that she sees little change in students today from those a generation ago. "I remember being that age, being so hopeful. I wonder if men are like that, too?"