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Summary
Summary
In Riven Rock, his most fully realized and compassionate novel to date, T.C. Boyle transforms two characters straight out of history into rich mythic creations whose tortured love and epic story is intimate enough to break our hearts. These unforgettable characters invite the reader's care as never before in a Boyle novel. With the scope of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Riven Rock uses real American subjects to come to terms with love and loss in the early years of our century. Boyle anchors his tale with the remarkable and courageous Katherine Dexter. Wed to Stanley McCormick - thirty-one-year-old son of the millionaire inventor of the Reaper, and a schizophrenic sexual maniac - Katherine struggles to cure him while he is locked up in his Santa Barbara mansion and forbidden the mere sight of a women - above all, his wife. Throughout her career as a scisntist ad suffragette, her faith never wavers: one day, one of the psychiatrists she finds for her husband will, she insists, return him to her, free of demons, a yearned-for lover. "Still America's most imaginative contemporary novelist" (Newsweek), Boyle weaves his hallmark virtuoso prose onto a recreation of America's age of innocence against a backdrop of wealth and privilege. And at the center of Riven Rock are its people, somehow bound together in thier deep sense of fidelity to each other.
Summary
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.
Author Notes
T. C. Boyle was born Thomas John Boyle in Peekskill, New York on December 2, 1948. He received a B.A. in English and history from SUNY Potsdam in 1968, a MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1974, and a Ph.D. degree in nineteenth century British literature from the University of Iowa in 1977. He has been a member of the English department at the University of Southern California since 1978.
He has written over 20 books including After the Plague, Drop City, The Inner Circle, Tooth and Claw, The Human Fly, Talk Talk, The Women, Wild Child, and When the Killing's Done. He has received numerous awards including the PEN/Faulkner Award for best novel of the year for World's End; the PEN/Malamud Prize in the short story for T. C. Boyle Stories; and the Prix Médicis Étranger for best foreign novel in France for The Tortilla Curtain. His title's Sam Miguel and The Harder They Caome made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
T. C. Boyle was born Thomas John Boyle in Peekskill, New York on December 2, 1948. He received a B.A. in English and history from SUNY Potsdam in 1968, a MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1974, and a Ph.D. degree in nineteenth century British literature from the University of Iowa in 1977. He has been a member of the English department at the University of Southern California since 1978.
He has written over 20 books including After the Plague, Drop City, The Inner Circle, Tooth and Claw, The Human Fly, Talk Talk, The Women, Wild Child, and When the Killing's Done. He has received numerous awards including the PEN/Faulkner Award for best novel of the year for World's End; the PEN/Malamud Prize in the short story for T. C. Boyle Stories; and the Prix Médicis Étranger for best foreign novel in France for The Tortilla Curtain. His title's Sam Miguel and The Harder They Caome made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (8)
Publisher's Weekly Review
T.C. Boyle (for that is how the former T. Coraghessan now styles himself) has gone back into recorded American history again, as he did in The Road to Wellville, for his characters and story, embroidering as necessary with his knack for grotesque portraiture and violent action. His protagonist is Stanley McCormick, the charming, upstanding son of the millionaire inventor of the American Reaper, who was struck down by madness in his young manhood at the turn of the century and spent much of his life incarcerated in a Santa Barbara sanitarium originally built, with McCormick wealth, for his equally mad sister. Other pivotal characters are Stanley's wife, the beautiful and determined Katherine Dexter, whose faith in her husband's eventual recovery never wavers, and Eddie O'Kane, the burly, handsome Boston-Irish womanizer and boozer who is Stanley's male nurse for much of his life. Stanley requires a male nurse because his illness, apparently brought on by a crushing father and a clinging mother, is a psychosexual disorder that leads him to attack women on sight (and has prevented him from ever having sex with Katherine). Boyle is very good on the parade of idiosyncratic doctors and psychiatrists who troop through Riven Rock, as the Santa Barbara place is called, and on faithful Eddie's dreams of escape. The problem with the book is that, for all its vividness, one senses early that nothing is going to change. Stanley will have lucid intervals; then something will turn him into a raging madman once more, and poor Katherine will have to be patient and long-suffering all over again; Eddie will have his problems with the drink and the women. Meanwhile, the 20th century, with its cars, jazz and flappers, catches up with this California outpost. Despite the powerful writing, the dailiness of this long novel does it in. A rather desultory trial scene at the end doesn't lift the book, and it ends quietly and glumly. Author tour. (Feb.) FYI: Boyle's 1995 novel, The Tortilla Curtain, has just received France's Prix Medicis Etranger Prize. Viking will release Boyle's Collected Stories in fall 1998; Penguin's newly repackaged editions of East Is East, Water Music and World's End are now available. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
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 stow 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 ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
This is novel number seven for Road to Wellville (1993) author Boyle. Continuing his fascination with the early part of the twentieth century, Boyle has created an imaginative and touching work of fiction based on the lives of actual historical characters. Young, talented, handsome--and incredibly wealthy--Stanley Robert McCormick is the youngest son of Cyrus McCormick, Chicago's famous inventor of the mechanical reaper. Smart, worldly--and also very wealthy--Katherine Dextor, the second woman to graduate from MIT, finds Stanley to be a romantic and sensitive, if somewhat eccentric and high-strung, suitor. Less than three years into their marriage, Katherine is forced to face the facts of Stanley's increasingly violent behavior toward women and his steady descent into madness. For more than 20 years, Stanley is confined to locked quarters within the luxurious Santa Barbara estate known as Riven Rock, attended to by a staff of male nurses and a succession of psychiatrists, each anxious to apply the latest cure. Boyle has created some endearing and memorable characters, among them the free-spirited and freewheeling Irish head nurse, Eddie O'Kane, steadfastly loyal even through his own alcoholic decline. Set very firmly in time and place, this story highlights some deep and universal concerns: loyalty and responsibility, treatment of the mentally ill, helplessness and frustration, and most of all, hope. Boyle's unique humor and appreciation of life's total absurdities, along with his ability to capture a whole universe of feeling in a single phrase, make this book a joy to read. --Grace Fill
Library Journal Review
Boyle's protagonists seem larger than life, but they are based on the real thing: scientist/suffragette Katherine Dexter and her husband, a schizophrenic sexual maniac and son of the man who invented the reaper. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
T.C. Boyle (for that is how the former T. Coraghessan now styles himself) has gone back into recorded American history again, as he did in The Road to Wellville, for his characters and story, embroidering as necessary with his knack for grotesque portraiture and violent action. His protagonist is Stanley McCormick, the charming, upstanding son of the millionaire inventor of the American Reaper, who was struck down by madness in his young manhood at the turn of the century and spent much of his life incarcerated in a Santa Barbara sanitarium originally built, with McCormick wealth, for his equally mad sister. Other pivotal characters are Stanley's wife, the beautiful and determined Katherine Dexter, whose faith in her husband's eventual recovery never wavers, and Eddie O'Kane, the burly, handsome Boston-Irish womanizer and boozer who is Stanley's male nurse for much of his life. Stanley requires a male nurse because his illness, apparently brought on by a crushing father and a clinging mother, is a psychosexual disorder that leads him to attack women on sight (and has prevented him from ever having sex with Katherine). Boyle is very good on the parade of idiosyncratic doctors and psychiatrists who troop through Riven Rock, as the Santa Barbara place is called, and on faithful Eddie's dreams of escape. The problem with the book is that, for all its vividness, one senses early that nothing is going to change. Stanley will have lucid intervals; then something will turn him into a raging madman once more, and poor Katherine will have to be patient and long-suffering all over again; Eddie will have his problems with the drink and the women. Meanwhile, the 20th century, with its cars, jazz and flappers, catches up with this California outpost. Despite the powerful writing, the dailiness of this long novel does it in. A rather desultory trial scene at the end doesn't lift the book, and it ends quietly and glumly. Author tour. (Feb.) FYI: Boyle's 1995 novel, The Tortilla Curtain, has just received France's Prix Medicis Etranger Prize. Viking will release Boyle's Collected Stories in fall 1998; Penguin's newly repackaged editions of East Is East, Water Music and World's End are now available. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
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 stow 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 ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
This is novel number seven for Road to Wellville (1993) author Boyle. Continuing his fascination with the early part of the twentieth century, Boyle has created an imaginative and touching work of fiction based on the lives of actual historical characters. Young, talented, handsome--and incredibly wealthy--Stanley Robert McCormick is the youngest son of Cyrus McCormick, Chicago's famous inventor of the mechanical reaper. Smart, worldly--and also very wealthy--Katherine Dextor, the second woman to graduate from MIT, finds Stanley to be a romantic and sensitive, if somewhat eccentric and high-strung, suitor. Less than three years into their marriage, Katherine is forced to face the facts of Stanley's increasingly violent behavior toward women and his steady descent into madness. For more than 20 years, Stanley is confined to locked quarters within the luxurious Santa Barbara estate known as Riven Rock, attended to by a staff of male nurses and a succession of psychiatrists, each anxious to apply the latest cure. Boyle has created some endearing and memorable characters, among them the free-spirited and freewheeling Irish head nurse, Eddie O'Kane, steadfastly loyal even through his own alcoholic decline. Set very firmly in time and place, this story highlights some deep and universal concerns: loyalty and responsibility, treatment of the mentally ill, helplessness and frustration, and most of all, hope. Boyle's unique humor and appreciation of life's total absurdities, along with his ability to capture a whole universe of feeling in a single phrase, make this book a joy to read. --Grace Fill
Library Journal Review
Boyle's protagonists seem larger than life, but they are based on the real thing: scientist/suffragette Katherine Dexter and her husband, a schizophrenic sexual maniac and son of the man who invented the reaper. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Prologue: 1927, World Without Women | p. 1 |
| Part I Dr. Hamilton's Time | |
| 1. How His Hand | p. 9 |
| 2. Eve | p. 30 |
| 3. Psychopathia Sexualis | p. 47 |
| 4. False, Petty, Childish and Smug | p. 66 |
| 5. Giovannella Dimucci | p. 87 |
| 6. The Harness | p. 111 |
| 7. Stanley of the Apes | p. 126 |
| Part II Dr. Brush's Time | |
| 1. Love is Loyal, Hope is Gone | p. 159 |
| 2. For the Main and Simple Reason | p. 189 |
| 3. The art of Wooing | p. 215 |
| 4. One Slit's Enough | p. 233 |
| 5. The Match of the Year | p. 260 |
| 6. Of Death and Begonias | p. 281 |
| 7. Prangins | p. 305 |
| Part III Dr. Kempf's Time | |
| 1. Benign Stupors | p. 323 |
| 2. La Lune de Miel | p. 346 |
| 3. On Shaky Ground | p. 362 |
| 4. I've Seen Your Face | p. 377 |
| 5. In the Presence of Ladies | p. 395 |
| 6. Sick, Very Sick | p. 418 |
| 7. Three O'clock | p. 431 |
| 8. Come on in, Jack | p. 451 |
| Epilogue: 1947, World Without Walls | p. 463 |
| Prologue: 1927, World Without Women | p. 1 |
| Part I Dr. Hamilton's Time | |
| 1. How His Hand | p. 9 |
| 2. Eve | p. 30 |
| 3. Psychopathia Sexualis | p. 47 |
| 4. False, Petty, Childish and Smug | p. 66 |
| 5. Giovannella Dimucci | p. 87 |
| 6. The Harness | p. 111 |
| 7. Stanley of the Apes | p. 126 |
| Part II Dr. Brush's Time | |
| 1. Love is Loyal, Hope is Gone | p. 159 |
| 2. For the Main and Simple Reason | p. 189 |
| 3. The art of Wooing | p. 215 |
| 4. One Slit's Enough | p. 233 |
| 5. The Match of the Year | p. 260 |
| 6. Of Death and Begonias | p. 281 |
| 7. Prangins | p. 305 |
| Part III Dr. Kempf's Time | |
| 1. Benign Stupors | p. 323 |
| 2. La Lune de Miel | p. 346 |
| 3. On Shaky Ground | p. 362 |
| 4. I've Seen Your Face | p. 377 |
| 5. In the Presence of Ladies | p. 395 |
| 6. Sick, Very Sick | p. 418 |
| 7. Three O'clock | p. 431 |
| 8. Come on in, Jack | p. 451 |
| Epilogue: 1947, World Without Walls | p. 463 |