Book Review: "Riven Rock"
Apr. 7th, 2004 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsT. C. Boyle writes about Americana, and the weird and wonderful past America has had, with a kind of explosive delight. His best known work, The Road To Wellville, is a fun read, better than the movie, and full of the kinds of details that make you laugh out loud even as you wince with the grossness of fin-de-siecle "health resorts."
Riven Rock is a different story altogether. It's true-to-life, like Wellville, in that the main characters really did live the life he reveals: Stanley McCormick did inherit the McCormick Farm Reaper fortune, he did marry Katherine Dexter, MIT's first female graduate, and he did go stark raving mad in 1907 at age 31, living out the rest of his life in Riven Rock, a lonely mansion overlooking the Pacific, while a spate of ill-informed physicians and newly-hatched Freudians attempted to cure him of schizophrenia and sexual mania.
The prologue tells the story: Stanley is doomed. There will be no miracle. No cure. And yet, the story is compelling: Katherine really loves Stanley and spends the entire novel trying to find a cure for him; since she's not qualified to do it herself, she throws herself into other things, like the vote for women and birth control. She faces Anthony Comstock. Hers is the true tragedy of the novel, because she is a real person who, for whatever reasons humans do, never abandoned her hopeless cause and never learned the touch of physical love.
Which isn't all it's cracked up to be in the novel. Stanley's male nurse, Edward O'Kane, is the foil to Stanley's sexual obsession and sexual life. The hard-drinking, womanizing Irishman O'Kane spends most of his life caring for Stanley while wrecking his own marriage and his friendships with his own inability to think before dropping his pants. Stanley thinks to obsessively about sex; O'Kane not at all.
But what makes Riven Rock so compelling is Boyle's language:
Goddess, I wish I could write like that. And I can't help but compare it to two other writers I've read recently: Don Delilo and John Clute. With Delilo and Clute you can see the craftsmanship, you can feel the authors torturing every line for perfection. Delilo works so hard making every paragraph a glittering jewel of newness that he often forgets he's supposed to be telling a story. Clute just out to freakin' impress the snot out of ya with his talent.
Boyle apparently just wants to be a writer. Language like the above seems to come naturally to him. It's so amazing, so compelling, that you can't stop reading it, long after you've realized that not only did the prologue tell the story but that the commentary that is the whole of the novel will only end more depressingly than it began.
Riven Rock is a different story altogether. It's true-to-life, like Wellville, in that the main characters really did live the life he reveals: Stanley McCormick did inherit the McCormick Farm Reaper fortune, he did marry Katherine Dexter, MIT's first female graduate, and he did go stark raving mad in 1907 at age 31, living out the rest of his life in Riven Rock, a lonely mansion overlooking the Pacific, while a spate of ill-informed physicians and newly-hatched Freudians attempted to cure him of schizophrenia and sexual mania.
The prologue tells the story: Stanley is doomed. There will be no miracle. No cure. And yet, the story is compelling: Katherine really loves Stanley and spends the entire novel trying to find a cure for him; since she's not qualified to do it herself, she throws herself into other things, like the vote for women and birth control. She faces Anthony Comstock. Hers is the true tragedy of the novel, because she is a real person who, for whatever reasons humans do, never abandoned her hopeless cause and never learned the touch of physical love.
Which isn't all it's cracked up to be in the novel. Stanley's male nurse, Edward O'Kane, is the foil to Stanley's sexual obsession and sexual life. The hard-drinking, womanizing Irishman O'Kane spends most of his life caring for Stanley while wrecking his own marriage and his friendships with his own inability to think before dropping his pants. Stanley thinks to obsessively about sex; O'Kane not at all.
But what makes Riven Rock so compelling is Boyle's language:
He didn't want to wake her-- or his son either. It was too peaceful, the submarine light, the stealthy tick of the clock, the rudiments of birdnoise, and he didn't want to have to talk to her about the McCormicks and the meeting and what he feared and what he hoped-- he hardly knew himself. He stripped off his flannels at the side of the bed and slipped naked into the sitting room with his good Donegal tweed over one arm and a fresh suit of underwear over the other, and dressed like a thief of clothes. Then he was out the door and into another life.
Goddess, I wish I could write like that. And I can't help but compare it to two other writers I've read recently: Don Delilo and John Clute. With Delilo and Clute you can see the craftsmanship, you can feel the authors torturing every line for perfection. Delilo works so hard making every paragraph a glittering jewel of newness that he often forgets he's supposed to be telling a story. Clute just out to freakin' impress the snot out of ya with his talent.
Boyle apparently just wants to be a writer. Language like the above seems to come naturally to him. It's so amazing, so compelling, that you can't stop reading it, long after you've realized that not only did the prologue tell the story but that the commentary that is the whole of the novel will only end more depressingly than it began.
