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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780140271669
ISBN number: 014027166X
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 480
Printing Date: January 01, 1999
Publishing house: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Sale Popularity Level: 324050
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product 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 humour 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.
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 very first of the McCormicks to crack. Will the 31-year-old patient be cured? His wife, the very 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 subsequent 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 very 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 colour 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 very 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.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
TCB colors in the dusty old grey & white history of a celebrity American couple - Mr. & Mrs. Stanley McCormick. He, the lunatic son of Cyrus McCormick, and heir to the fortune of the International Harvester Company. She, the gallant Katherine Dexter McCormick, very first female to graduate MIT with a science degree, champion suffragette and eventual sponsor of the birth control pill. Riven Rock is the mansion built and maintained by the extended McCormick family originally to house Stanley's crazed older sister, and now Stanley, a schizophrenic and sexual psychopath. At Riven Rock, high atop the California coastline, Stanley is walled off from any contact with the opposite gender for over two decades, and administered by a series of self-serving quacks.
RIVEN ROCK gives a wink to Boyle's earlier novel THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE that portrays similar quackery at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and in a way serves as a good sequel to that novel. Boyle uses the almost farcical real life history as launching pad to a masterfully told tale, albeit dishearteningly sad, of the lives between the headlines of these historical figures. He excels in painting in his own characters who inhabit the periphery of the history: Eddie O'Kane, the ever optimistic and loyal Irish nurse who spills from one tumult to the next; the various doctor/administrators of Riven Rock, who are lunatic in their own way; and the many employees and servents of the McCormick entourage. Equally brilliant are Boyle's descriptions of the madcap day-to-day operations of the lunatic asylum, including chases about the grounds, digging up gopher holes, sprinting after the escaped patient and so forth. A bit of Keystone Cops meets Cuckoo's Nest.
The novel grows a bit long in the end, and leaves us wanting another tale exclusively focused on Eddie O'Kane. As interesting imaginative background on a woman, Katherine Dexter, who played an enormous role in women's contraception and left a lasting legacy at her alma mater, RIVEN ROCK is entertaining commentary on social issues of the early twentieth century.
Rated by buyers -
This book is something different. Its not the ordirany type of book. Its a crazy one.
This is about a rich guy who has a mental desease and gets treatment. He is crazy and his wife is supporting him and staying by him through all theese years. Its a interesting book and i couldnt put it down because i wanted to know what would happen.Will she leave him at the end? Will he die?Will he get cured??
it was a good read, so i recommend this one!
Rated by buyers 
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Yes, I finished RIVEN ROCK and have been mulling it over.
I remember mulling over a line from LOVE STORY, "Love means never having to say you're sorry."
Now, I have been mulling over a life of loving someone who never seems to be able to love you back, at least not appropriately. Love from afar. Stanley and Katherine.
Can we count love that seems so nontraditional? Perhaps that is the greatest kind of love of all... selfless and unconditional, hoping but not expecting to ever get anything back...Katherine's love for Stanley.
The dysfunction, the heartbreak...The multi-millionaire McCormick Family. Reaping what they sow...mental illness.
Of course I was not disappointed in the darkly humorous aspects of this tale of WHOA! Quirky sex acts that either didn't happen or were all wrong...apes and obssessive compulsive habits and the early courtship before it all went bust...good stuff. Good read. Lots to ponder for a long time.
Thanks, TCB.
Rated by buyers -
We are drawn into a horrific mental illness.No details are spared; the brilliance of this book is that our sympathy is maintained in spite of this.
Rated by buyers -
I'm a Boyle fan. I'm so glad to have discovered him and to know that every six months or so I can pick up a book (a new one or one of his many earlier works) and enjoy his quirky characters, inventive storylines and his wonderful language. Riven Rock is another strong showing. It's not as purely entertaining as Drop City, or as inventive as A Friend of the Earth, but it's a solid novel that displays all of Boyle's wit and linguistic gusto.
He's so good that I've come to accept certain characteristics of his writing that others might call flaws. For example, I don't think he nails endings with real finality. His books just eventually get to a point where it's time to stop. Everything isn't necessarily wrapped up. Now, if you're looking for things tied up neatly you'll be disappointed. But if you know that's unlikely to happen you'll do just fine. A T.C. Boyle book is likely NOT to lead to Stanley's miraculous recovery. You may hope for it throughout, but any Boyle reader will know not to expect the obvious.
I also find that over various books some of his charactes start to be duplicated in variations. The Edward character from this one, for example, is much like other selfish - horney - fickle - pathetic (and yet charismatic) characters from Boyle stories and novels. It's a type he returns to again and again. Personally, I like that. I'll take a little break, and then pick up another T.C. novel soon.
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