Hello, here in Massachusetts, of course, we were fascinated with the obvious allusions to the Chappaquidic (1969) disaster. Re: Ted Kennedy's abandonment of his young woman campaign aide in a car-overboard accident like the one described in BW. The Senator -- tho JCO set BW in the 1980s -- was recreating K'ennedy's waterloo -- from the horrific point of view of the drowned victim. I interviewed JCO for a Boston newspaper when she visited Harvard Square at the time BW was published and JCO spoke to a bookstore audience. We discussed the similarity of the BW heroine's drowning to a gas chamber execution. (In the novel the heroine is adamantly against capital punishment.) JCO is also anti-capital punishment: dating clear back to the short story "Legacy" in her first short story collection BY THE NORTH GATE. The "money shot" of BW is the horrific circumstances of the heroine's long killing ordeal in the submerged car -- similar to her real life counterpart's agonizing death while Ted Kennedy, assuming she died on impact, left her to drown. By the way, I am pro-Kennedy, despite his clear guilt in that death. His subsequent political career cannot "make up" for what he did; however, I see it as a weirdly wonderful kind of community service penance. He could have done far worse, post Chappiquidick.
Cyrano
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