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In 1905, Stanley McCormick, heir to East Coast millions, is most definitely mad. Heredity and an early, horrifying glimpse of his naked sister have rendered him schizophrenic, incapable of being around women--right down to his wife, Katherine, "a newlywed who might as well have been a widow." Not even the dawn of modern psychiatry can save him. Instead, he's barred and carefully cosseted in Riven Rock, the California estate he helped design for his sister, the first of the McCormicks to crack. Will the 31-year-old patient be cured? His wife, the first female graduate of MIT, believes that he will. So, too, does his loyal head nurse, Eddie O'Kane, a preternaturally articulate, handsome Boston Irishman. Indeed, Eddie thinks himself blessed with good luck. Going to Montecito to care for Mr. McCormick will, he is convinced, enable him to take center stage in the drama of his own life.
Over the next 20 years, Stanley will go from catatonia to a semblance of normality (so long as there's no woman in sight and no sharp cutlery on the table). Eddie, however, will never play the leading role he'd envisioned, instead taking refuge in alcohol and recollections of the one woman he thinks he has let get away, the plainspoken, explosive Giovannella Dimucci. When Eddie first describes his patient's violent response to women, "he wondered if he'd gone too far, if he'd shocked her, but the mask dissolved and she leaned in close, her hand on his elbow. 'Sounds like the average man to me.'" As for Katherine McCormick, she will still visit every Christmas, hoping to at least see her husband if she can't see him get better.
Based on a true story, Riven Rock is unclassifiable, a discomforting and often hilarious mix of tragedy and comedy. (Only Orson Welles could do the book justice on film.) T. C. Boyle writes in a controlled frenzy of rich description and dialogue, pulling us up sharply each time we begin to wonder if his patient isn't a helpless victim. Eddie recalls one nurse before Stanley "got to her": "She was a shadow in a back corner of his mind, a cat you pick up to stroke and then put down again when it stops purring.... Now she was back in Rhode Island, with her mother, but the look of her that day, the way her eyes had melted away to nothing and the color had gone out of her so you could see every lash and hair on her head like brushstrokes in oil, came to him in infinite sadness."
Boyle has great empathy, but there is no avoiding his novel's comic energy. Stanley's first psychiatrist-jailer, Dr. Hamilton, is obsessed with primate sexuality and will go to Riven Rock only if Katherine funds a large living laboratory. He spends all of his time watching the imprisoned creatures copulate, a pathetic counterpoint to his patient's plight. The sight of the disheveled doctor following one animal encounter amuses even the suspicious Katherine. "To his credit, the doctor laughed too. And O'Kane, the bruiser, who'd gone absolutely pale at the tiny hominoids that couldn't have weighed a twentieth of what he did, joined in, albeit belatedly and with a laugh that trailed off into a whinny." Alas, all goes awry when Hamilton takes the joke too far and declares his chimps "the very devils--they're even worse than my patients." Riven Rock is a maximum-velocity study of love, primal energy, and what is sacrosanct in society: control. It is also about loyalty, absurdity, domesticity, and depravity, all of which, Boyle knows, coexist within the best of souls.
From Library Journal
When Stanley McCormick, the brilliant but highly strung son of the inventor of the Reaper, marries Boston socialite and MIT graduate Katherine Dexter, the papers call it the wedding of the century. But the marriage is never consummated, and after a disastrous honeymoon, a catatonic Stanley is moved to Riven Rock, a prisonlike mission in Santa Barbara. Diagnosed as a schizophrenic sex maniac, Stanley is to be kept entirely separate from women, including Katherine, who may speak to him only by telephone. Katherine goes on to become a major figure in the burgeoning suffrage movement and even smuggles a steamer trunk full of contraceptives into the country in support of Margaret Sanger, but she never divorces her husband or gives up hoping for a cure. Riven Rock resembles The Road to Wellville (LJ 3/15/93) in its send-up of medical quackery in the early years of the century, but here the fact-based love story takes precedence over satire. This affecting and surprisingly mature novel is Boyle's best book since Water Music (1981). Recommended for most fiction collections.-?Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los AngelesCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New Yorker
In Boyle's assured hands, this odd American tale turns into a bracing examination of misogyny, mental illness, and the shadowy side of love.
The New York Times Book Review, D.M. Thomas
The book is filled with good writing and richly observed scenes; it has humanity and humor in abundance. And yet the promise of intellectual and emotional exploration hinted at in the novel's opening paragraph is not fulfilled. Perhaps a little more shockingness--with such a theme--might have made the novel more powerful.
The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Jonathan Levi
Boyle writes with the muscle of a collegiate fullback ripping the OED in two just for fun.
From Kirkus Reviews
Division and separation are the dominant themes of Boyle's dark-hued and deftly plotted seventh novel, which bears strong incidental resemblances to his earlier World's End (1987) and The Road to Wellville (1993), though it displays a richer Dickensian brio throughout. The title denotes a California mansion built on the spot where a growing acorn had split open a boulder, thence attaining full maturity. Which is more than can be said for Stanley McCormick, who might be called this novel's agonist. He's the youngest son of millionaire Chicago inventor Cyrus McCormick; a ``neurasthenic'' young man driven by a chaos of terrifying formative experiences into a state of sexual dementia so uncontrollable that he must be restrained in ``a world without women,'' under the watchful eye of a physician who studies the social habits of lower primates. Stanley's doctors come and go, over the years, but despite unpredictable intervals of lucidity he remains locked away and guarded, most faithfully by his ``head nurse'' Eddie O'Kane, a likable roustabout who has his own problems with compulsive behavior, and women. We follow the story of Stanley's long incarceration, beginning in 1912, through Eddie's sometimes glazed- over eyes. In parallel narratives, Boyle entwines with it the dispiriting tale of Stanley's haunted youth and deranged manhood, and also the story as lived by his wife Katherine Dexter McCormick, a strong-willed and accomplished beauty, still a virgin decades after her wedding day, who has sublimated her unfulfilled love for her husband among what Eddie angrily dismisses as ``birth control fanatics and blood-sucking feminists.'' The issues that divide the emergent century and the gulf that separates the sexes thus frame, and memorably echo, this big novel's narrative and emotional core: the craziest love story imaginable, but a love story nevertheless- -one that chills the bones as you read. Vintage Boyle: a freakishly inventive black comedy, populated with irresistible eccentrics, that leaves a bracing and bitter aftertaste. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Book Description
T. C. Boyle's seventh novel transforms two characters straight out of history into rich mythic figures whose tortured love story is as heartbreaking as it is hilarious. It is the dawn of the twentieth century when the beautiful, budding feminist Katherine Dexter falls in love with Stanley McCormick, son of a millionaire inventor. The two wed, but before the marriage is consummated, Stanley experiences a nervous breakdown and is diagnosed as a schizophrenic sex maniac. Locked up for the rest of his life at Riven Rock, the family's California mansion, Stanley is treated by a series of confident doctors determined to cure him. But his true salvation lies with Katherine who, throughout her career as a scientist and suffragette, continues a patient vigil from beyond the walls of Riven Rock, never losing hope that one day Stanley will be healed. Blending social history with some of the most deliciously dark humor ever written, Boyle employs his hallmark virtuoso prose to tell the story of America's age of innocence--and of a love affair that is as extraordinary as it is unforgettable.
About the Author
The award-winning author of seven novels and four collections of short stories, T. Coraghessan Boyle was born in Peekskill, New York and taught high school English there after graduating from the State University of New York at Potsdam. He continued his education at the University of Iowa's famed Writers' Workshop, where he finished Descent of Man, his first collection of short fiction. He went on to publish three others -- Greasy Lake, If the River Was Whiskey, and Without a Hero -- establishing himself as a master of the genre. Over the past two decades, T. C. Boyle has also written several wonderfully diverse novels: Water Music, an 18th-century picaresque; Budding Prospects, about a group of hapless marijuana farmers; World's End, an historical novel about his native upstate New York for which he won the 1988 PEN/Faulkner Award for American Fiction; East Is East, about a Japanese sailor and a southern writers' colony; The Road to Wellville, a comic look at a turn-of-the-century health spa; and The Tortilla Curtain, about ethnic strife in Southern California.
T. C. Boyle currently makes his home near Santa Barbara, California, not far from the McCormick estate. Since 1977 he has been a professor of English at the University of Southern California. His newest collection, T. C. Boyle Stories, including seven stories not previously published in book form, was published by Viking in November 1998.
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