- Paperback: 480 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd (31 May 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 014027166X
- ISBN-13: 978-0140271669
- Product Dimensions: 19.7 x 13 x 2.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,720,480 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Riven Rock
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk 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 centre 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 dishevelled 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 20th 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. --James Marcus --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Product Description
Geneva, 1904 - Newlyweds Katherine Dexter and Stanley McCormick stand for their picture on the grounds of Prangins, Katherine's chateau in Switzerland. She is 29, the first female graduate in the sciences of M.I.T. and a leader in the budding Women's Movement. He is the youngest son of Cyrus and Nettie McCormick, reluctant heir to a fortune built on the Reaper. Socialite and millionaire, they are the match of the year -- and they seem to have fallen in love. But Stanley isn't well. He sees things, hears voices, finds himself unable to control his violent outbursts toward women. Shortly after the marriage, he is diagnosed as a schizophrenic and sexual maniac, and his doctors - the best money can buy - lock him away at Riven Rock. He is forbidden the company of women - above all, his wife. Katherine can only watch her husband and wait, crouched outside among the begonias with her binoculars, like a field biologist studying the habits of some rare, wild animal. Yet she returns every year, laden with gifts and news of the outside world, continually hopeful: one day, she believes, one of the psychiatrists she enlists will return Stanley to her, free of demons, a yearned-for lover. In the hands of T. Coraghessan Boyle, these real characters out of American history are transformed into rich mythic creations whose tortured love and deep sense of fidelity, set against a backdrop of wealth and privilege, will break your heart.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Like most of Boyle's books this is a fairly demanding read - it's not one which you'll finish in an afternoon.
However, the effort is well rewarded with the compelling story of Stanley McCormick, a man all but imprisoned in the first decades of this century because of his severe mental illness - manifested by his hatred/fear of women. If this sounds depressing, believe me the book isn't - there are many comic side-effects that lighten the account.
McCormick's illness is nicely contrasted with the life of his senior nurse, O'Kane, who enjoys (?), and acts on, all the same urges as his employer, but whose behaviour, in that time period, is deemed acceptable.
This is a fascinating study of the treatment of mental illness in the first years of this century. How would McCormick fare today?
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I cannot recommend this novel highly enough - a thoughtful, insightful and dramatic examination of the collapse and recovery of a paranoid schizophrenic, a study of the development of American psychiatric practice in the first quarter of the century, a social drama focused on the lives of the nurses who care for the protagonist and a heartbreaking love story pitting the naivete of youth and inexperience against the implacable obstacle of barely-understood mental illness. Set against the backdrop of the first World War, the prohibition and the women's suffrage movement, the novel is gripping, fascinating and emotionally engaging throughout. Boyle's prose is pitch-perfect and his characters raucously alive. The best of his books that I have read.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Riven Rock is a beautifully wrought,unsentimental, examination of a marriage between an institutionalized schizophrenic sexual predator and his high-brow wife who married him before his ultimate break-down. T.C. Boyle is original and insightful throughout.
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