Normally, I’d refrain from citing an author’s age, but here it merits disclosure.

But when the child recovers and YK calls again with “instructions: place, date, time”, Hannah whimpers only the lightest of protestations before walking down yet another plush hotel corridor as numbly as a somnambulist. Rushing her to hospital, she blames herself for the “contagion” she’s inflicted on her family. When, that night, her young daughter becomes dangerously ill, she briefly comes to her senses, a mother again. A lover!” While the Filipino housekeeper makes smoothies for her children downstairs, she discards her soiled clothes and takes a shower, discovering that her breasts hurt “not unpleasurably”, reliving almost happily “that sinking sensation, the man’s desire, excluding her”. But more than that, though still traumatised, she is also elated: “I have a lover.

There, on a street where the houses are “set apart from one another on three-acre lots”, keeping neighbours safely out of view, she still cannot risk her husband knowing where she’s been. To be able to write with such tearing astuteness about such fiercely contemporary issues would be a feat for any author of any ageĪs Hannah leaves the hotel – and there are plenty of indications that she may not make it out of there – and drives herself, bruised and bleeding and broken back to her home on prosperous Cradle Rock Road, you assume that she’ll go to the police. What follows is one of the most harrowing descriptions of a prolonged sexual assault that I can remember reading. She is immediately pulled inside and the door locked. In her gardenia-scented clothes and high heels, Hannah finally summons the courage to knock on the door marked “Do not disturb”. Someone who will make her feel cared for, unlike her patronisingly taciturn businessman husband who, since the Babysitter attacks, keeps a Magnum revolver in the bedside drawer. For lonely, bourgeois Hannah, who believes that “if a woman is not desired, a woman does not exist”, is searching less for sex (which is “repugnant” to her) than for a “soulmate”.

შავი წყალი by Joyce Carol Oates