Black Water

Joyce Carol Oates puts her clean, idiosyncratic prose (many of the sentences are fragments and the punctuation isn't standard, but readability and rhythm don't suffer) to work retelling the incident when Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge and a young woman died. In some ways this short novel is a horror story, as it describes the black water rising and the woman furiously trying to escape the submerged car. Where it expands into the woman's memories and hopes, it becomes pitilessly sad.