Kelly Kelleher is an idealistic, twenty-six-year-old "good girl" when she meets the Senator at a Fourth of July party. In a brilliantly woven narrative, we enter her past and her present, her mind and her body as she is fatally attracted to this older man, this hero, this soon-to-be-lover.Kelly becomes the very embodiment of the vulnerable, romantic dreams of bright and brave women-drawn to the power that certain men command-at a party that takes on the quality of a surreal nightmare. One of the acknowledged masters of American fiction, Joyce Carol Oates has written a bold tour de force that parts the black water to reveal the profoundest depths of human truth.
