Riven Rock (Paperback)

by T.Coraghessan Boyle (Author) "How his hand came into contact with her face-her sweet plump irritating little burr of a wifely face that found a place beside his each..." (more)
Key Phrases: sheet restraints, upper parlor, riven rock, Santa Barbara, Sam Wah, Butler Ames (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 Angeles
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (March 29, 1999)
• ISBN-10: 0747542929
• ISBN-13: 978-0747542926
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,785,571 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #29 in

  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( B ) > Boyle, T.C.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating story of male sexuality and female response, March 21, 1998

By	B. Smith - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Riven Rock (Hardcover)

Boyle has written an almost mythic exploration of the sexual tensions between men and women. There is exquisite irony in the commonality between the two principle male characters: the wealthy and brilliant schizophrenic Stanley McCormick who is deemed to be so dangerous to women that he must be kept away from them forever, and his nurse Eddie O'Kane the supposedly normal male who beats his wife, beds every woman he can, deserts his son, drinks too much, and gets into bar fights. Who is the madman, the book begs us to ask, and who is normal? If both men suffer, and their wives and families also suffer, what is the cure? McCormick's loyal wife Katherine tries to answer this question by engaging in two lifelong pursuits that seem, at first glance, to be unrelated and even contradictory. One is her selfless dedication to her husband's well-being and hope for his cure, and the second is her role as an activist in the women's suffrage movement where she strives for sexual equality and lives, if only temporarily and by choice, in a world without men. But every attempted cure -- from Katherine's response as a social activist to the wackiness of early 20th Century psychiatry, to O'Kane's wives' and girlfriends' manipulations -- fails. Almost a hundred years later, we still don't have a good answer to the question of how men and women are supposed to live together. In the end, Riven Rock is a tragedy and the questions it raises remain unanswered.

25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars He can write, but...., June 15, 2000

By	A. Maxham "Just trying to help..." - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Riven Rock (Paperback)

I saw TC Boyle discussing Riven Rock on A&E on a Sundaymorning and it seemed fascinating, so I hopped on Amazon that day andordered it. I've read several novels based on historical facts, so I seen elsewhere the struggle that novelists who write this type of novel are faced with- How do you tell the "truth" without frustrating or boring people if the truth is, in fact, frustrating or boring.

Unfortunately, I was both frustrated and bored with this book. This is my first TC Boyle book and the man can write. I could smell Stanley's rotten teeth and I could see him scrubbing his toes. I also really shared (as best I could) Stanley's fear and disorientation at becoming like his mentally ill sister. This is probably part of the problem.

The story is about a guy with rich and mean parents who meets a girl who, despite the fact that he is CLEARLY becoming more and more mentally ill, marries him anyway. And this is no ordinary woman. This is the first female graduate of MIT, in the physical sciences, no less. This is a woman with a scientific and practical mind. Unfortunately, Boyle is saddled with the task of explaining sympathetically why this woman- despite all evidence suggesting she should borrow Julia Robert's running shoes from that flick last year and RUN LIKE HELL- doesn't. I just didn't buy it. I had assumed that Stanley didn't display evidence of mental illness until after they were married- but oh no. She had every opportunity to make like a tree.

Also- Stanley's mom is made out to be this evil villain b/c she tried to keep Katherine and Stanley from getting married, and then when it dawns on Katherine that she's married a (and I mean this in the nicest way possible) a wacko, Stanely's mom is portrayed as supersized evil because she tells Katherine basically, "you've made your bed- now lie in it." Apparently I'm supersized evil as well, because that's what I was thinking.

I think Katherine is supposed to be perceived as this determined admirable creature. Maybe I've watched too much Oprah, but she just didn't quite have enough sense of self-preservation. I was irritated with her- but I think it's because Boyle is such an incredible writer that she did feel like a true person, worthy of being irritated with.

And the whole story is static ... Aside from this external status quo, there is no internal development- obviously Stan hasn't really grown as a person, so you look towards Katherine- and she just becomes political and gets a girlfriend. I kept hoping something would happen ...P>The problem is that Boyle could elegantly and perfectly describe the most foul smell thing in the world- the question is- do you want to smell it?

As a side note- I did a little research about the characters. Stanely and Katherine are real people, but the nurse Eddie is a fictious character based on Stanley's nurse, but his name wasn't Eddie, and I don't think he was quite the slime Eddie is. I think Boyle simply introduced him so *somebody* would do *something* and Boyle wouldn't be restrained by facts.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant historical fiction, January 14, 2002

By	Douglas A. Greenberg (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Riven Rock (Paperback)

T.C. Boyle writes with a manic energy and a sardonic edge that render each and every page dazzling, riveting, and thoroughly enjoyable. He felicity of expression is matched by few of his contemporaries among American novelists (Jonathan Franzen, Tom Wolfe, and John Irving come to mind for me). Consequently, no matter what subject matter he chooses, his books are always a joy to read.

Boyle apparently encountered the historical basis for *Riven Rock* soon after he moved to the Santa Barbara area some years ago. Yes, Stanley McCormick, the tall, handsome youngest son of the legendary inventor of the mechanical reaper, was indeed schizophrenic, he did indeed marry the wealthy socialite Katherine Dexter in 1904, and he did indeed spend most of his adult life locked away with doctors, nurses, and attendants in a palacial Montecito estate. In *Riven Rock*, Boyle takes the historical misfortune that was the McCormick-Dexter marriage and transforms it into a fascinating story that is at once tragic, bizarre, and pathetic, and yet which is also riddled with sometimes unexpected touches of humor.

The humorous veneer to this otherwise tragic tale stems from Boyle's skills as a savage social critic with an unerring eye for the foibles that are part and parcel of the human condition. Having already caricatured the faddish American cult of health and nutrition in *The Road to Wellville*, Boyle here lampoons the pretentions of early twentieth century psychiatry and in a broader way, the overall vapidity of upper class life and discourse.

And Boyle does so much more. By complementing his principal upper-class historical personalities with a supporting cast of purely fictional working class characters (most notably the handsome, testosterone-driven attendant Edward O'Kane) Boyle also is able to reveal the broader foibles associated with the American "war between the sexes."

This steady sprinkling of sardonic humor related to pompous doctors and the hopelessly clueless womanizer O'Kane, however, is in the end overshadowed by the tragedy that marks the real life story of Stanley and Katherine. Stanley's incurable insanity, Katherine's youthful inability to recognize the extent of his affliction, and her subsequent noble but futile willingness to sacrifice on his behalf makes for a truly heartbreaking story that ultimately can have no storybook ending. Moving adroitly back and forth in time as he weaves a narration that spans decades, Boyle is nothing short of brilliant in the way he reveals, bit by small bit, the extent of the pathos that characterizes this saga.

Overall, this is an engrossing and rewarding novel that shows T.C. Boyle to be one of the most gifted and creative contemporary American novelists.