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Riven Rock

by T. C. Boyle

The son of a wealthy inventor is incarcerated in a Santa Barbara mental hospital because of a psychosexual disorder that makes him attack women on sight. His male nurse is a womanizing alcoholic, and his long-suffering and devoted wife never loses hope for his recovery. This novel is based on the true story of Stanley McCormick (heir to the McCormick Reaper fortune) and his suffragist wife, Katherine. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998.

Available editions of Riven Rock

	9780140271669, Paperback, Penguin Group USA, 1999 $1.00 (Used, Very Good) Other copies of 9780140271669

	9780670878819, Hardcover, Penguin Group USA, 1998 $1.00 (Good) Other copies of 9780670878819

Publisher Notes

In Riven Rock, his most fully realized and compassionate novel to date, T.C. Boyle transforms two characters straight out of history into rich mythic creations whose tortured love and epic story is intimate enough to break our hearts. These unforgettable characters invite the reader's care as never before in a Boyle novel. With the scope of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Riven Rock uses real American subjects to come to terms with love and loss in the early years of our century. Boyle anchors his tale with the remarkable and courageous Katherine Dexter. Wed to Stanley McCormick - thirty-one-year-old son of the millionaire inventor of the Reaper, and a schizophrenic sexual maniac - Katherine struggles to cure him while he is locked up in his Santa Barbara mansion and forbidden the mere sight of a women - above all, his wife. Throughout her career as a scisntist ad suffragette, her faith never wavers: one day, one of the psychiatrists she finds for her husband will, she insists, return him to her, free of demons, a yearned-for lover. "Still America's most imaginative contemporary novelist" (Newsweek), Boyle weaves his hallmark virtuoso prose onto a recreation of America's age of innocence against a backdrop of wealth and privilege. And at the center of Riven Rock are its people, somehow bound together in thier deep sense of fidelity to each other.

Media Reviews

"The two things Boyle has been unable to do with any sustained success is create a sympathetic, three-dimensional character and tell a story that engages feelings other than laughter, horror, superiority or contempt....With 'Riven Rock,' he has apparently decided to try, as he once put it, 'to do emotions,' rather than embrace his more antic comic talents....The results are...mixed: a long, meandering and fluently written book that has some truly affecting moments but that ultimately reduces two of its three main characters to caricatures. It is an ambitious, laudable effort that falls short of being a fully satisfying novel....By the end of 'Riven Rock,' we feel pity for Stanley and Katherine. It's a far cry, certainly, from the contempt we feel for so many of Boyle's earlier characters, but it's also a poor substitute, in the end, for sympathy, insight or understanding."

First Line

For twenty years, twenty long dull repetitive years that dripped by with the sleepy incessant murmur of water dripping from a gutter, Stanley McCormick never laid eyes on a woman.

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