Riven Rock
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 first of the McCormicks to  crack. Will the 31-year-old patient be cured? His wife, the 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 next 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 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 Rockis unclassifiable, a discomforting and often  hilarious mix of tragedy and comedy. (OnlyOrson Wellescould 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 color 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 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 Rockis  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.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.