Riven Rock: book review

Riven Rock

By T. C. Boyle

Riven Rock is the tale of Stanley McCormick who is crazy, and his wife who is kept from him for over twenty years. He has issues with women. Eventually, she gets desperate and resorts to standing in the bushes and peering through binoculars just to get a glimpse of his face.

Stanley is heir to a fortune, accumulated in the latter portion of the 1800s, his father dies while he is young, leaving him in the hands of an overbearing mother, 2 older brothers and an older sister who goes crazy in front him.

Katherine Dexter comes from a well-heeled family herself, so isn’t after Stanley’s money. Indeed, I failed to see why she went for him at all, considering how crazy he showed himself to be before he popped the question. Though she was twenty-nine, and a virgin, her getting too old was not an issue. Since both were rich, they could do anything they chose.

Eventually, crazily, they get married.

It is a period piece, set in the first few decades of this past century, and the language used in Boyle’s prose style reflects this. I give him an ‘E’ for effort. His history and research are solid. And, a lot of the sub-plots are interesting, but there is no follow through.

There were many things I would liked to have known. Characters were introduced, then allowed to fade away. Stanley’s sister went nuts in front of him, yet, within the first 100 pages she’s nothing more than background; you never hear about her. I kept expecting there to be some mention of their parallel, crazy existence’s.

I was looking forward to the end of this book, just to see if Stanley and Katherine ever got together and had a normal life, but I was disappointed. The last twenty years of Stanley’s life was told in an epilogue a few pages long.

The book was serviceably written. Stanley and Katherine were compelling characters, well drawn, but I got the impression that Boyle didn’t love them. Somewhere in the middle I put it aside and read 3 other books. I forced myself to finish.

I am a fan of T.C. Boyle’s short stories (I think I’ve read them all) but I don’t care much for the novels. He tends to run out of interesting things for his people to do. Had Riven Rock been a short story it could have been awesome.

Bush wins

November 4, 2004 Thursday 2:43pm

Bush Wins

No, I didn’t vote for George W. Bush. I voted against him. The candidate for the other side really mattered little. I don’t know of any democrat I wouldn’t have used as a tool to dismantle the current administration.

Yeah, I’m pissed

What really gets me about this last time was all the subterfuge, and how easily most Americans were duped by it. Yes, Bush calls himself a Christian, and yes he is against gay marriage and abortion, but how on earth do those issues affect the common American?

Real issues, like the war in Iraq and no-bid contracts and an impending draft, pale in comparison to the fear Bush Jr. put into the hearts of common Americans who might witness two men kissing or long lines of teenage girls in front of abortion clinics.

The fact is, same-sex marriage is already illegal, so the ‘defense of marriage’ crap that the republican machine was spewing was nonsense. And making abortions illegal with not make abortions go away, you’ll just start hearing about botched back-alley abortions, again, where young girls will die at the hands untrained abortionists in unsterile conditions.

Killer Christian

So Bush calls himself a Christian. Well, I’ve done a little survey

of those I know who voted for Bush, and I asked them, “What makes

George W. Bush a Christian?”

One person told me, “Well, he goes to church.” The rest cited his stance on gay marriage and abortion. I hate to break it to you folks, but those things do not make you a Christian, or all Muslims would be Christians as well, and we know they ain’t Christians, don’t we?

I would define a Christian as one who lives by the words and works of Jesus; one who tries to be Christ-like.

There is the tale of Jesus coming upon the crowd of people preparing to stone a woman. Jesus did not want the woman to die, so he picked up a rock and offered it to the crowd saying, “Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone.”

In fact, what Jesus did was to commute the sentence of a woman condemned to die. No one threw a rock at her after that.

Consider this tale: George W. Bush was the governor of Texas for six years. In that time, 152 people were executed by the state of Texas. Bush had 152 opportunities to do what Jesus would have done, which is to prevent them from dieing, and he chose not to, 152 times.

Doesn’t sound very Christ-like, to me.

So, who was it that became president of the United States of America? His words say ‘Christian’ but his actions say something else entirely.