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Review by Robert Weibezahl
Stanley McCormick, heir to the Mechanical Reaper fortune, spent more than half his life squirreled away in a mansion in Santa Barbara, California, suffering from a sexual pathology that precluded his ever being near a woman. From this curious historical fact, T. Coraghessan Boyle has fashioned "Riven Rock," his latest literary expedition into the more outlandish margins of America's past.
Less humorous than Boyle's earlier books, "Riven Rock" is nonetheless compelling, thanks to the author's ability to fully imagine the lives of this peculiar love story's principal players -- McCormick, his wife Katherine, and his head nurse Eddie O'Kane, a randy, opportunistic Boston Irishman who hitches his wagon to McCormick's diminished star in hopes of an eventual payoff.
From the start, Stanley McCormick was a sensitive youth, protected and dominated by an imperious mother who had already lost one child to insanity. Katherine Dexter was a truly extraordinary woman for her times. One of the first women to graduate from M.I.T., she felt that she had found in Stanley a soul mate, a man unlike most of the blustering rich boys who inhabited her world.
Because Boyle has tipped us off in the prologue to "Riven Rock" that this marriage is doomed, none of the subsequent events is particularly surprising. Stanley, driven beyond distraction by sex and its immoral implications, is unable to consummate the marriage. He slowly descends into his strange insanity and, after attempting to rape a female nurse and a woman on a train, is locked away.
What fuels the novel is Katherine's unflappable hope. Incontrovertibly in love with her husband, she refuses to concede that they have no future together. With ample cash reserves from her own inheritance, she spends years battling first Stanley's mother and later his brother and sister for control of her husband's well-being. She remains true to Stanley, a virgin to her death, throwing her considerable energies into such controversial women's causes as birth control and the vote.
On the sidelines throughout this long tragedy is O'Kane, a representative working class man of the early century. As a man who embraces the pleasures of sex with little thought of its consequences, he is Stanley's natural foil. His story, at times, seems completely separate from the McCormicks', yet it brings a welcome earthiness to the novel.
Because of its persistent hopelessness, Stanley and Katherine's story is a tough one to tell, and Boyle's achievement in "Riven Rock" is his ability to wring poignancy from a tale so telegraphed from the start. Always a bold, inventive and intelligent storyteller, he can accurately imbue his characters with historically sound sensibilities, yet make them utterly convincing for the modern reader. Like poor Stanley McCormick, imprisoned forever behind iron bars in his palatial manor, they linger, ghostlike, long after the book has ended.
Robert Weibezahl lives in Los Angeles, where he writes about books and culture for a number of publications.
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