Average customer rating:
- Unconditional dysfunctional love...
- Sympathy for the Devil
- Boyle wit and linguistic gusto
- Loved it with qualifications
- absolutely worth a read.
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Riven Rock
T.C. Boyle
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
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Binding: Hardcover
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Boyle, T.C.
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ASIN: 0670878812 |
Amazon.com
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 Rock is unclassifiable, a discomforting and often hilarious mix of tragedy and comedy. (Only Orson Welles could 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 Rock is 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.
Book Description
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.
Customer Reviews:
Unconditional dysfunctional love..........2007-09-03
Yes, I finished RIVEN ROCK and have been mulling it over.
I remember mulling over a line from LOVE STORY, "Love means never having to say you're sorry."
Now, I have been mulling over a life of loving someone who never seems to be able to love you back, at least not appropriately. Love from afar. Stanley and Katherine.
Can we count love that seems so nontraditional? Perhaps that is the greatest kind of love of all... selfless and unconditional, hoping but not expecting to ever get anything back...Katherine's love for Stanley.
The dysfunction, the heartbreak...The multi-millionaire McCormick Family. Reaping what they sow...mental illness.
Of course I was not disappointed in the darkly humorous aspects of this tale of WHOA! Quirky sex acts that either didn't happen or were all wrong...apes and obssessive compulsive habits and the early courtship before it all went bust...good stuff. Good read. Lots to ponder for a long time.
Thanks, TCB.
Sympathy for the Devil.......2007-07-05
We are drawn into a horrific mental illness.No details are spared; the brilliance of this book is that our sympathy is maintained in spite of this.
Boyle wit and linguistic gusto.......2006-08-14
I'm a Boyle fan. I'm so glad to have discovered him and to know that every six months or so I can pick up a book (a new one or one of his many earlier works) and enjoy his quirky characters, inventive storylines and his wonderful language. Riven Rock is another strong showing. It's not as purely entertaining as Drop City, or as inventive as A Friend of the Earth, but it's a solid novel that displays all of Boyle's wit and linguistic gusto.
He's so good that I've come to accept certain characteristics of his writing that others might call flaws. For example, I don't think he nails endings with real finality. His books just eventually get to a point where it's time to stop. Everything isn't necessarily wrapped up. Now, if you're looking for things tied up neatly you'll be disappointed. But if you know that's unlikely to happen you'll do just fine. A T.C. Boyle book is likely NOT to lead to Stanley's miraculous recovery. You may hope for it throughout, but any Boyle reader will know not to expect the obvious.
I also find that over various books some of his charactes start to be duplicated in variations. The Edward character from this one, for example, is much like other selfish - horney - fickle - pathetic (and yet charismatic) characters from Boyle stories and novels. It's a type he returns to again and again. Personally, I like that. I'll take a little break, and then pick up another T.C. novel soon.
Loved it with qualifications.......2005-06-23
TC Boyle is such a good writer and story-teller, and this particular story and its attendant characters are so fascinating, that I found I couldn't put the book down. The prose is, for the most part, energetic, riveting, lush, evocative -- everything I've come to expect from Boyle. But I do agree with reviewer A. Maxham that Boyle hasn't dug quite deep enough into the character of Katherine to make us understand how such an obviously intelligent woman could have married the lunatic Stanley. I think he comes close -- love is a strange thing, and people fall in love despite obvious red flags all the time -- but in this case I had trouble believing that, when all was said and done, Katherine would go ahead and marry Stanley anyway. So it took a little more concerted effort to suspend my disbelief concerning that aspect of the book (and it's a central aspect). Still, I was willing to make the effort bec. I was enjoying the book so much, and I was sorry when the story ended.
absolutely worth a read........2005-05-16
My favorite part is the theme of being thwarted. Incrementally, and not perpetually, and frequently from within -- within yourself, your marriage, your family. Hope and frustration grappling back and forth, neither giving way for long.
It was a fascinating read and I devoured the book. I liked the descriptions, I liked the intermeshed characters, and I really, really liked the narrative structure that passes back and forth between past and present very skillfully. That said, while reading it was deeply satisfying, thinking back, there's something I just can't put my thumb on, something inside the book that feels... well, thwarted.
Average customer rating:
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Encierro En Riven Rock
T. C. Boyle
Manufacturer: Galaxia Gutenberg
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Contemporary
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Spanish
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ASIN: 8481092916 |
Average customer rating:
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RIVEN ROCK
BOYLE
Manufacturer: Bloomsbury
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Contemporary
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ASIN: 0747537933 |
Average customer rating:
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Riven Rock
T.Coraghessan Boyle
Manufacturer: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0747539774 |
Average customer rating:
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Riven Rock
T. C. Boyle
Manufacturer: Viking Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000NUC3S4 |
Average customer rating:
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Riven Rock
T. C. Boyle
Manufacturer: Books on Tape
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Cassette
ASIN: B000IM5Z1Y |
Average customer rating:
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Riven Rock
T. Coraghessan Boyle
Manufacturer: The Franklin Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Leather Bound
ASIN: B000VA99OW |
Average customer rating:
- discontinuous
- A truly exceptional, multi-layer fantasy epic
- One of my favorite fantasies.
- A rich fantasy
- Excellent-well thought out cultures- great read - sequels?
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Tribute Trail
Terri Beckett and Chris Power
Manufacturer: Speculation Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Spy Stories & Tales of Intrigue | Thrillers | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
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Epic | Fantasy | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
General | Fantasy | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
Goddesses | New Age | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books
Medical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0967197902
Release Date: 2007-02-05 |
Book Description
Kherin is the Goddess' Chosen, Prince of the golden lands of Khassan. Rythian is a skilled hunter and scout, destined for greater glory. They meet on the Tribute Trail, one a slave, the other a ruler. Together they forge new destinies for both their peoples and find a love destined by the gods.
Customer Reviews:
discontinuous.......2005-11-08
This is a strange book, written by two authors, where indeed much is to praise and just as much is to censure.
The overall plot is good, very fast paced, rich in long, satisfying climax scenes, but there are some disturbing inconsistencies and true errors.
Just to make a little example, the height of the people seems to vary constantly. Moreover the northener main hero is said to be comparatively short in comparison with his tribe but he is nonetheless much taller than his women and at least "two handspans" taller than his lover... two handspans? it would mean that he is approximately 200cm and that his people are at least 210, assuming his (male) lover be 160cm.
The first chapters are a little slow, even clumsy, then the story takes off to land clumsily again in the last ones.
The world depicted here is clearly drawn from Europe in the first centuries a.D. with its savage nomadic tribes counterposed to some refined civilizations such as Byzantium and pre-islamic Arabia.
The main characters are endearing, even if I must underline how the opposition good vs evil is sometimes a little too neat and that the love between the two main heroes is much too often incensed with exaggerated imagery, so that the side characters of Arun and Voran, homosexual and life-bonded as the two main ones, are much more likeable and believable.
The writing is generally professional, with very proficient pages and a few silly, rhetorical ones, but I really sensed two different hands in these pages, hands which did not necessarily agree with each other as to what to make of the story.
An entertaining reading which could have been much better with a little editing.
A truly exceptional, multi-layer fantasy epic.......2001-09-10
Tribute Trail is the story of Kherin, goddess-consort and military leader of Khassin, who is betrayed and sold into slavery by a jealous cousin, and his efforts to reunite himself with his goddess and enact his revenge. The multilayer plot is complicated first by evil spellcasters who prevent Kherin from using his powers, then by a jealous fellow-slave who does everything possible to keep Kherin from gaining the freedom promised to all four tribute slaves by the new Sun Stallion. Rescued by the Sun Stallion's wives and sisters (marriage is a malleable concept having to do more with living arrangements and providing for children than devotion -- that kind of pair bonding is reserved for a different relationship that can be either homo- or heterosexual), Kherin sets out to win over the Sun Stallion and his warriors so that he can return to Khassin with an army. Of course, his task is anything but easy, especially since he's made a number of very powerful enemies in the Sun Stallion's court.
If that had been the book's sole plot, it would have been an entertaining sword and sorcery excursion. But while Kherin is making his physical journey to a spiritual destination he is sure of, the Sun Stallion is making a spiritual journey to acknowledge the cause of the physical reality he accepts without question. His path is no less fraught with dangers than Kherin's, and filled with betrayals, slavery, and death-defying battles of a different sort. The two stories, each capable of supporting an entire book, intertwine and mirror each other to create a truly exceptional work. Although it's a stand alone novel, I hope it's the first of a very long series by these authors set in this delightful world. There are still many people and places I want to explore.
-- Reviewed for the Science Fiction Romance newsletter
One of my favorite fantasies........2000-08-02
I was priviledged to read this book in manuscript form -- and fell in love with it then. The world Beckett and Power have built is rich and believable, and I am deeply involved with all the characters. I love not only the heroes but their friends, lovers and spouses (which tend to be one and the same at times), I loathe their enemies and root for the good guys to not only triumph, but to serve their gods and save/change their respective cultures. I love this book!
A rich fantasy.......2000-02-05
"Tribute Trail" is a thought provoking read, not a mere "sword and sorcery" novel. A rich fantasy setting provides the backdrop to consideration of Goddess Worship, male bonding, relationships (and many of the hurt/comfort variety) and Family groups, along with action and adventure. Rythian struggles to become - and remain - Sun Stallion, while Kherin seeks to redeem his honour, and fulfil his destiny in the service of the Goddess. This book does not shy from difficult, intense or intimate imagery. The characters are well drawn, from Kherin and Rythian, to Merse (and his gradual redemption) and Voran; from Syth, Rythian's loyal wife, to the three Priestesses - young and fiery maiden; practical and honourable mother; and the devious crone. The threads of the two men's lives, one in service to the Goddess, one in honour of the God, are woven together, binding opposites and equals into a fierce, loyal love and an incredible power.
Excellent-well thought out cultures- great read - sequels?.......1999-11-05
I really enjoyed this book - one of the things that most often turns me off in fantasy books is cultures that are unworkable. Both cultures in this story LIVE - and the characters are believable, not too perfect - burdened with their own doubts and choices, their own humanness. And the story is written without falling into the 'sword and sorcery/hero' set-up that is so common today it's like a modern subculture. This turned into one of those read til 2 AM on a work day, ignore the TV, books. I would really like to see more books with these characters - I can think of many challenges that could face them ahead. (I know I like the characters when I start imagining book covers in my head.) READ AND ENJOY!
Book Description
Eleven hundred years after the apocalyptic destruction of the United States of America, peace between the remaining warring tribes has finally been achieved. Despite this peace, the Pelbar stronghold Threerivers retains its secretive and reclusive ways, keeping its distance from the other remaining tribes and guarding against change. A strict matriarchy, Threerivers remains the most conservative Pelbar community under the unquestioned and unyielding rule of its leader, Udge.
Life in Threerivers continues without change until two young twin brothers, Brudoer and Gamwyn, accidentally initiate events that threaten the established order. The resulting chain of consequences sends Gamwyn on a quest to the far reaches of this postapocalyptic world. Within Threerivers, Brudoer’s imprisonment threatens the long-established matriarchal rule of the Pelbar stronghold.
The Fall of the Shell is the fourth book in the classic series of postapocalyptic novels about the people of Pelbar
Customer Reviews:
Interesting overlooked work of SF.......2003-06-05
This is the fourth and central work of a series about the spiritual and technological rebirth of a future North America wrecked by nuclear war. Overtly the setting is straight after-the-bomb, but the construction of societies which each have their own strengths and weaknesses is nice, and the overall flow of the stories is well done.
This novel is the best of the series. Williams is a poor creator of setting and character, but the novel moves so gracefully through the plot that many readers will forgive him his failings. The title resonates over and over through events as symmatrical as the huge stone cities of the Pelbar, the one human society in central North America to have continued as an urban civilization.
As a literary engine, this is one of the finest fantastic stories I have ever read. Worth a try. If you like it, try the others.
Product Description
Multiple books shipped as one item. Save on Shipping/Handling charges.
Book Description
Spend less time in the kitchen and more time with your family....Since the first edition of Once-a-Month Cooking was published in 1986, its proven, practical method has helped hundreds of thousands of families cut down their cooking time and still enjoy home-cooked meals every night.Newly revised to satisfy today's lower-fat tastes, this easy-to-follow, family-tested cookbook explains how to: plan ahead, spend less time in the supermarket, cut down on prep time, group similar kitchen tasks together to get them all done at once, make kitchen clean-up more manageable, use the freezer, computer, and our head to create a month full of delicious, nutritious meals and actually have enough time to relax and enjoy them. Once-a-Month Cooking is the perfect cookbook for today's busy lifestyles.
Customer Reviews:
Wrong Book.......2007-06-08
I ordered the book that is associated with this review. However, when the book arrived, it had a different cover and didn't have the same recipes as I'd anticipated. I had originally checked the book out from my local library prior to deciding on purchasing it. Although the format is the same, I am somewhat disappointed that I didn't receive what I'd actually ordered. I didn't send it back due to the book container other good recipes.
More of The Same 'Ol, Same 'Ol........2007-05-21
If you have any of the prior published versions, there is nothing new in this current one that justifies the purchase.
One-a-Month Cooking.......2007-02-15
This is a very practical guide for big-batch cooking. I learned a lot of helpful techniques and the recipes were practical and intice my trying them. It gave lots of guides for shopping and organizing your cooking day.
Love it !!!.......2007-02-15
I love this cookbook. I love the idea of cooking once a month. I did this before when my children were young and scaled it down to once a week at first. Then worked my way up to once a month. The recipes are easy to follow. You can work your own recipes into the cooking day and now that my daughters are grown and married I decided to get a new copy for myself and one for each of them. Cook everything in one day, and take a great meal out of the freezer every day for a month! What could be better than shopping once and having meals for 31 days? You can't beat this idea.
Absolute time saver!.......2007-01-22
I have used this cookbook for over 20 years, and absolutely love it! When I don't have time to cook, I have something in the freezer that beats fast food. It helped me survive baseball season, dance, soccer, and all the kids activities! It will now help as I pursue an advanced degree. I highly recommend this cookbook. (I will say that 2 people in the kitchen is a must on a cooking weekend.)
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