Riven Rock (review)

Riven Rock by T. C. Boyle Viking, 1997, 466 pp., $24.95 Boyle often relies on a conceit of some kind to get his fiction going. Riven Rock's conceit comes in the person of Stanley McCormick, a man so rich and so nuts that he spends the better part of his adult life locked up in a mansion with bars. Once again, American history becomes the canvas for Boyle's dark comic fiction. Based on the true story of a West Coast eccentric, the novel addresses, among other things, the beginnings of modern psychiatry. In flashbacks, the foundation of Stanley 's insane hatred of women is laid out, perhaps too neatly: distant father, overbearing mother, insane older sister , and repressive times. Despite signs of Stanley's growing insanity, Katherine Dexter, daughter ofa Boston Brahmin, marries him. But when Katherine attempts to lure Stanley to the marriage bed, he reacts with near murderous violence, and she has him committed. There's no quick cure, so for most of the book's 466 pages, Stanley is locked up in California while Katherine fights for women's suffrage on the East Coast. Boyle interweaves their story with that of Edward O'Kane, McCormick 's head nurse. O'Kane's attempts at finding happiness lend a breadth and spice the book would otherwise lack, but his story occasionally comes off as filler. Do we need to know all about O'Kane to understand McCormick ? We don't know the stories of any of the other servants and psychiatrists that surround McCormick, yet we understand him perfectly well. What we learn about the other characters tends toward caricature. O'Kane is a drunk, philandering Irishman. Giovanella Dimucci, his lover, is a violently passionate Italian who cooks a mean bowl of pasta. Both Stanley's mother and motherin -law are overbearing and emasculating . The women of Riven Rock are either bitches or whores. While Stanley McCormick's misogyny is supposed to be entirely his own, Boyle has an excessive amount of fun with it. Boyle also persists in his selfconscious habit of using ten-dollar words where a two-bit one would do just fine. He transports you to California , 1917, and you get a great sense of the newness of the place, its odd juxta-positions: crisp new mansions overlooking still crusty frontier towns. Then a word such as "flagitious" brings you back to reality. This landscape is Boyle's, and you better not forget it. Few would deny that T. C. Boyle is clever. This makes his writing often amusing and sometimes hollow. On the whole, Rife« Rock is no exception , but Boyle's portrait of Katherine and Stanley's romance, and her subsequent devotion to Stanley, redeems them, if not the book, in the end. We understand what Katherine sees in Stanley and why she never gives up hope that one day the succession of psychiatrists she hires will find "the old Stanley" someplace inside the insane man in the padded mansion. (WJ) The Deep Green Sea by Robert Olen Butler Henry Holt, 1997, 226 pp., $23 208 · The Missouri Review ...