He sent flowers daily, whole greenhouses full, and he called each evening on the stroke of seven, his palms sweating, heart thumping, eyes crawling in his head," Boyle writes of Stanley's courtship, hinting at imminent hysteria. These flashbacks anchor "Riven Rock," widening its psychological dimension. Most importantly, they focus our attention and our compassion on the main players, even as war, economic collapse and earthquakes occur.
Readers with a taste for Boyle's blustering, often hysterical language will find plenty of it here. And those who suspected that the writer could do more may be pleasantly surprised to discover that, in "Riven Rock," he has.
Insanity and loyalty define family
In 1904, Stanley McCormick married Katherine Dexter in what many considered the marriage of the year. Stanley, the youngest son of Cyrus and Nettie McCormick, was the sensitive and artistic heir to the McCormick reaper fortune. Katherine, last in the line of a family whose roots extended into colonial society, was a 29-year-old free-thinking socialite, a graduate of MIT, and a leader in the women's suffrage movement. Though seemingly a perfect relationship, Stanley and Katherine's marriage remained unconsummated, and within two years of taking their vows, Stanley - given to violent outbursts and incessant conversations with his "Judges" - was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and a sex maniac.
Rather than subject him to the mercies of an unenlightened judicial system or to the barbarism of early-1900s institutional care, Stanley's family locked him away at Riven Rock, the compound they had constructed near Santa Barbara, Calif., for his insane sister. Katherine, struggling against the McCormicks' disregard of her wishes, spent the rest of her life loyal - and presumably faithful - to her husband, forever hoping that he would be, somehow, miraculously, cured.
These are the facts, the history from which T Coraghessan Boyle (World's End, The Road to Wellville) has distilled his seventh and most powerful novel. But in the novel, the story becomes very much more than facts. Riven Rock in some of Boyle's most explosive and expansive prose, explores the McCormicks' tragic marriage and all that it represents. In his hands, Riven Rock becomes a fictional study of the entire spectrum of social, psychological and sexual developments that marked the first quarter of the 20th century. It also becomes a study in the antithetical concerns of loyalty and responsibility, dependence and strength, despondence and hope. Most of all, it is an exploration of love in all of its many forms. It is as detailed as the most precisely written history, but remarkably truer, more meaningful and more resonant than history can hope to be.
Boyle accomplishes these feats primarily through the struggles and complexities of his characters. Among his strongest is Katherine Dexter, vulnerable yet fiercely defiant, an embodiment of the emerging women's movement who never becomes stereotypical. She is at once the victim of a love that evolves from the romantic to the platonic and a warrior who battles one of the strongest families in the United States. Equally strong is Stanley's head nurse, Eddie O'Kane. Seeped in a misogyny as deep as his Irish roots, Eddie battles alcohol and the women in his life in a parody of sanity that parallels his employer's madness. Chasing his fruitless dream of becoming a rich orange farmer, he discovers the absurdity - and meaning - of his life in an existential confrontation with his dependence on and love for the maniacal Stanley.
Most surprising of all of Boyle's characters, however, is Stanley himself. A lesser writer might have treated Stanley as flat and unchanging, forever mired in his insanity. Boyle refuses such simplicity. His Stanley is dynamic and thoroughly alive, a man aching both to love and to destroy women. Though incapable of completely appreciating his disease, he understands his situation well enough to suffer and to know that death is preferable to a life without women, a life spent cloistered within the dark halls of his family's secrets.
A succession of doctors representing the fads and fashions of mental health care in the early 20th century passes through Stanley's life, attempting to cure his affliction. But, like the rock for which he named the estate, Stanley remains until his death rent by madness, ". . . the very stuff of the earth's bones, solid rock, impenetrable, impermeable, the symbol of everything that endures, and here it was split in two, riven like a yard of cheap cloth, and by a thing so small and insidious as an acorn . . ."
Boyle, long recognized as a preeminent prose stylist, has been described as a literary magician. In Riven Rock he transcends even this lofty praise. Powerful, wise and emotionally devastating, the novel is more than mere magic and nothing short of miraculous.
Peter Kurth
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......what a great project......

It is so long !!!