When was the last time you read a work of historical fiction that left you completely satisfied? Not a novel “set in the past,” but the fictionalized account of actual persons who lived, breathed and — in this case — went mad in the hills above Santa Barbara, Calif.? In “Riven Rock,” his seventh novel, T. Coraghessan Boyle has taken the depressing story of Stanley R. McCormick, one of the sons and heirs of Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the reaper, and turned it into a thrilling, romantic, careening tale of love, redemption and the rewards of the faithful heart. It’s no small feat when you consider that Stanley McCormick was a paranoid schizophrenic and sexual maniac who spent the better part of his adult life locked away from women in a lonely, California-Moorish castle — the “Riven Rock” of the book’s title — surrounded by a team of male doctors and attendants who were his only companions for 20-odd years.
The case, while not famous, was certainly known in its time, particularly after 1929, when Stanley McCormick’s wife, Boston socialite and suffragist Katherine Dexter McCormick, sued to gain full control of her husband’s person and estate. She fought not only the Chicago McCormick dynasty but a slew of psychiatrists, lawyers, male nurses and hangers-on whose livelihoods all depended on McCormick’s remaining insane and in need of their care. The never-consummated, purely emotional marriage of Stanley and Katherine is the meat and heart of “Riven Rock,” balanced and mirrored by the adventures of Eddie O’Kane, Stanley McCormick’s hard-drinking, philandering, guilt-ridden Irish nurse (presumably modeled on McCormick’s real-life attendant, Kenneth McKillip, and one of the only characters in the novel whose name has been changed). O’Kane is earth and flesh to Stanley and Katherine’s romantic idealism. This is a novel about love and sex and the way they work, or don’t, together.
“All her life Katherine Dexter had been disappointed in men,” Boyle writes about his brainy heroine (one of the first women graduates of MIT, who ultimately left her husband’s entire fortune to her alma mater). “She didn’t like to generalize, but if she did she would find the average man to be false, petty, childish and smug, an overgrown playground bully distended by nature and lack of exercise until he fitted his misshapen suits and the ridiculous bathing costume he donned to show off his ape-like limbs at the beach.” Boyle is one of our finest descriptive writers, an Irishman through and through. It’s hard to know what impresses most, his stunningly unexpected way with a phrase — “He’d led the chase through three cars, bobbing and weaving in his maniacal slope-shouldered gait, apparently looking to run right on up through the length of the train, over the tender and across the nose of the locomotive to perch on the cowcatcher and catch insects in his teeth all the way to California” — or his bold romanticism and lyric tone: “It was the key, the first principle, the beginning. And so much was engendered there, the broken wall, the burning roof and tower, because the key fit and the key turned, and from that moment on he wooed her with the sweetest phrases from the driest texts, with reform, the uplifting of the poor, the redistribution of wealth and the seizing of the means of production for the good and glory of the common man.” This is a splendid book, a noble achievement, a work of art.
| It isn’t easy turning a run-of-the-mill story of yuppie disillusionment, degeneration and despair into a vivid, even riveting narrative that is also a stinging comment on our times, but David Gates has done it in “Preston Falls.” Gates, a book critic for Newsweek and author of the well-received “Jernigan: A Novel,” has a way of making the most ordinary dilemmas of the boomer generation seem startlingly significant and immediate. Following the latest in a series of cynical, dumbly predictable telephone squabbles with his estranged wife, Jean, the protagonist of “Preston Falls,” to his intense surprise, suddenly bursts into tears.
“And then he begins to weep,” writes Gates: “big glottal sobs he knows will turn to retching if he doesn’t stop … It doesn’t escape him how weird this is: that he could work up a few sobs only by imagining her feeling bereft. If this is narcissism — and what the fuck else could it be — it’s got a kink or two.”
Kinky indeed are the mental twists of “Preston Falls’” fading, flabby, guitar-slamming hero, Doug Willis, the PR representative for a major American “sports beverage” in New York City — a man stuck, like so many of his sex and generation, in a permanent longing for wildness and freedom. Up to his ears in debt, trapped in a sell-out job whose purpose he can no longer recall, Willis has two children to support in Westchester County and a ramshackle farmhouse way upstate, in that part of New York just south of Lake Champlain that ranks among the poorest rural areas in the country. The house in Preston Falls, permanently in need of repair, is Willis’ last-ditch stake at independence, the symbol of mourning for his lost youth and missed opportunities and the ready-made setting for the nightmare fraying of his mind. Willis’ wife hates the place, and his kids — two of the most terrifyingly homogenized children that modern culture could produce — are as indifferent to Preston Falls as they are to everything else except pop psychology, demonic music and political correctness.
“This book is so racist,” says Willis’ daughter, Melanie, when her aunt reads aloud to the family from “The Lord of the Rings.”
“You used to love it,” says her mother.
“Sure, when I was like eight.”
Gates’ ear for the banality and blandness of contemporary American diction is flawless, and he has a masterful way of shifting tone to suit the minds and personalities of his characters, in a narrative told entirely in the present tense. The novel is short on plot, but so are the lives of the Willises. It’s no betrayal to say that everything ends badly — half-badly, anyway, since there are no anchors in the lives of these people. When Jean Willis finally realizes that her marriage is over, she tells herself that it couldn’t have ended any other way: “Though of course it could. But she’d done her best. Which is also completely and absolutely untrue.” Willis, for his part, is headed straight for hell when we see him last. It ought to be depressing, but somehow it isn’t. It’s a fucking page-turner and shit, as Willis would say.
To: Sandy Thurman, Czarina for National AIDS Policy, Clinton Administration, Washington, D.C.
From: An AIDS patient
Dear Sandy,
May I call you Sandy? I’m not sure how I’m supposed to address an AIDS Czarina — “Your Tokenhood?” “Your Nothingness?” “Your Ineffectuality?” I’ve written books about the Romanovs, Sandy, and believe me, the Czars had a lot of power. All you’ve got is a title, an office and an “open door” to the president. That’s what he said, anyway, when he gave you the job back in April. He said: “My door is open to her.”
Of course, this is President Clinton talking, so a sentence like that could mean a lot of different things. It could mean that his door is open when it really isn’t. It could mean that his door is open until somebody tells him to close it.
Anyhow, Sandy, I’m writing about the State of AIDS Forum you and I are both going to be attending in Washington on Monday, that photo-op-and-press-release jamboree that the AIDS Action Council is putting on to announce that AIDS deaths are finally declining in this country, that with protease inhibitors and other drugs, AIDS is becoming a chronic, manageable illness instead of a terrifying, fatal disease.
Of course, there are still a few wrinkles to be ironed out. A lot of Americans with AIDS won’t be alive to clamber across that bridge to the 21st century the president promised he would build for all of us. Also, it’s not going to be easy putting — and keeping — millions of people on protease inhibitors when they don’t have any health insurance; when there isn’t a coherent national health-care policy at all, in fact; when hospitals and outpatient clinics are being closed down right and left by corporate thugs who wouldn’t know a moral principle or a social scruple if it came with a picture of Abraham Lincoln stamped on its forehead.
I’m sorry, Sandy, was that rude? You’re from the South, I understand, from Atlanta, where manners count for everything. Fagades do, anyway. But when Clinton introduced you to us in April, he said you were one outspoken gal. She is passionate. She is committed. She is difficult to say no to. If that’s true, Sandy, then you’re just like me and a lot of my friends, except for one important thing. People find it really easy to say no to us. They’ve been doing it for years.
Mind you, I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve been infected with HIV since 1983 or 1984, and so far I haven’t died of AIDS. I’m lucky in that I’m white and I’m male, and so far the protease inhibitors are working for me. I’m gay, of course, which I never thought would be an advantage in calamity, but with AIDS it is, funnily enough. Gay white men were the ones who went down first in this epidemic, and we’re the ones who rose up first to combat it. You can walk through that open door because we opened it for you, Sandy. I want you to remember that. And I want you to tell the president something from me the next time you see him.
Tell him that I’ve got his number; that I won’t believe a word he says until he puts his money where his mouth is; until he stops reneging on every promise he’s ever made to my community; until he reins in the insurance companies and the HMOs; until he stops carving up Medicaid and Medicare and stops allowing the drug lords — of the pharmaceutical industry, Sandy, not heroin and cocaine — to make billions of dollars off the backs of the terminally ill.
Tell him that from me, Sandy. If Ronald Reagan was the president who couldn’t bring himself to say the word AIDS, Bill Clinton is the one who can’t bring himself to do anything but say it. However, he speaks with forked tongue, I fear. But you — I had some hopes for you, Sandy. Which is it going to be, Blanche Dubois or Catherine the Great? I’ll be standing with the media hacks Monday morning, and I’ll be asking you again. I’ll be waiting for an answer.
