Curse of a head-shrinker

Fiction

Riven Rock

T. Coraghessan Boyle

Bloomsbury, #16.99

ON the most prosaic level, Riven Rock is the name of the maximum-security gilded cage in California in which almost all of the central characters in this weighty, fact-based work of fiction live out the bulk of their 50-year-long span. On a different literary plane, of course, the implicit notion of hardness rent asunder functions as T C Boyle's motivating metaphor.

For in this, his seventh full-length novel, Boyle marshals a parade of elemental division in all its multiplicity of forms. Chiefly, there's the separation of one man from his sense of rationality. For throughout Riven Rock's 468 pages, onwards from the turn of the twentieth century, we are presented with the grim story of an obsessive and guilt-ridden multi-millionaire, Stanley McCormick, a man hopelessly pincered in the hellish grip of a genetically-inherited, sexually-oriented and deeply-disabling mental illness.

Euphemistically put, McCormick fears himself a victim of the curse of Onan. He can never truly know a woman, for women terrify him as surely as they excite his crazed lusts.

Not unnaturally, Stanley's highly-disturbed and often foully anti-social behavioural malady casts somewhat of a pall over his wedding night, swiftly dividing him from his naive new bride, thin-lipped Katherine, an ascetic biologist and enthusiastic devotee of women's suffrage.

Nevertheless, such is the strength of Katherine's love for her husband, who is by turns either near-catatonic or wildly violent, that she resolves never to cease having him tended by the costliest practitioners of the emergent, frequently brutal art of psychiatry.

One of Stanley's closest everyday medical attendants is feckless male nurse Eddie O'Kane, a serial bed-hopper and proto-alcoholic whose carnal self has yet to be introduced to any notion of personal morality. If Stanley is in trouble because he thinks strangely and too much, all Eddie's problems are a result of his never thinking at all.

And there, in a nutshell, is Riven Rock. A fellow with every material and intellectual advantage is unmanned by his inability to channel his sexual urges, thereafter being deprived of every physical comfort by primitive head-shrinkers.

The woman he falls for proves to be blindly loyal. Unfortunately, she also proves to be as satisfactory an everyday life-partner as a riven rock: cold, flinty, obdurate, essentially unyielding.

The man's inarticulate overseer has little money, too many hotly adoring women in his life, and no insight into the painful ultimate cost of wilfully following his own all-too-frequently engorged passions. In other words, a barrel of laughs this ain't. Which is a shame, given that Boyle has previously shown himself to be a very funny writer indeed, as well as a highly inventive and learned arranger of words, a skilled stylist who has hitherto never lost sight of the fact that the pyrotechnic phrase which works best is the one that illuminates and doesn't simply dazzle.

For one of the unfortunate things that distinguishes Riven Rock is its linguistic plainness and neutrality, its all-round lack of zip, pep, and vim (not the most apt styles for a sombre study of mental illness, granted, but still much missed by me, Mr Boyle's No 1 fan). Nor do any of its characters inspire great sympathy in the reader.

Ultimately, Riven Rock is also a very long book that reads like a very, very, very long book. It toils endlessly over its tale. Hopefully, I'm wrong about it, and Riven Rock is actually a study of thwarted privilege to rival The Great Gatsby. Maybe Mr Boyle's literary sparkle has been temporarily dulled by his over-assiduous pursuit of historical accuracy, as was the case with The Road To Wellville, a worthy but dreary portrait of the bowel-besotted American entrepreneur who invented breakfast cereal.

Then again, T C's first novel, the free-wheeling Water Music, energised the real-life African travails of Mungo Park, the exploring Borderer and quintessential Victorian missionary.

So look, T C, forget historical fact. Get back to fearless first-hand dissection of modern problems (Budding Prospects, The Tortilla Curtain); humane wisdom; humour which is generous and never glib.