On the second month of ECQ, I am seeing its positive side as I am able to accomplish much this May. I was able to clean our bedrooom, rearrange stuff to make room for my other stuff which I would be getting later on, and which I just did last week. I am thankful to my sister for going with me to get my things and thank God the parents agreed for me to use the car. Aside from these, I am finally back to being a bookworm and have finished tonight my second non-acads related book: T. C. Boyle's Riven Rock.
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| I bought this book a decade ago from Booksale, and I can't believe I got a masterpiece for only PHP35! |
Riven Rock is a a novel set around the early 1900s about a power couple. Stanley Robert McCormick is an heir to the McCormick fortune built from the patriarch Cyrus' reaper company. His wife Katherine Dexter- McCormick is MIT's first woman graduate from the sciences program, and herself coming from a prominent family. What started as a sweet romantic affair becomes chaotically depressing as Stanley's mental illness manifests gradually leading to his incarceration in his family's estate named Riven Rock. While occupying himself with the estate for his sister Mary Virginia who was the first one to be confined in the property due to her mental illness, Stanley saw a slab of sandstone that was split in two, and thus gave the place its name. In 1912, he himself will be confined in the same place where he would meet his death.
"It was he very stuff of the earth's bones, solid rock, impenetrable, impermeable, the symbol of everything that endures, and here it was split in two, riven like a yard of cheap cloth, and by a thing so small and insidious as an acorn..." (p. 124)
Stanley is joined by his personal nurse Eddie O'Kane, among others, whose own story is interwoven with those of the McCormick couple. I cannot help but compare the two men. Shy, awkward, mild-mannered Stanley who is diagnosed with dementia praecox (read: sex maniac) is slowly regarded to be a danger to society after he exhibited violent behaviors. In one outing, he almost drowned a fisherman. He took a German teacher against the latter's will to Katherine's house when he is advised to study the German language to calm his nerves. He displays rude behavior when he calls his kindhearted, soft-spoken mother-in-law "a stupid old woman" inside her own home. He tries to hurt Katherine because of his paranoia that his wife is cheating on him with Butler Ames, a former suitor, when Katherine is busy with her plans in the academe. Prior to his diagnosis, Stanley is shown to be critical of capitalism, himself converting a portion of his business to a socialist venture. He is proud of such achievement and Katherine becomes attracted to him because of that.
On the other hand, O'Kane is a womanizer. For certain he is a competent man in his profession, and I can say that in his presence Stanley can be controlled for he is treated not as an employee but as a friend and confidant. I despise his character though for treating women as mere sex objects. He marries Rosaleen when she becomes pregnant with his child. And while in Riven Rock away from his wife, he seduces Giovanella who later on bears his son but is married to an old shoemaker because O'Kane is revealed to be an adulterer and therefore they cannot marry. The shoemaker dies eventually during the Spanish Flu pandemic, and later on Giovanella marries O'Kane when things become more peaceful between them. And I have to add that O'Kane physically hurt these two women, and yet he is considered to be a normal person. Maybe this is one theme of the book, of how society's standards weigh and how this distorts our views of what is right and just.
I am also amused at how Katherine will do anything to get Stanley back, even hiring psychiatrists who are obvious quacks. Then again, the field of psychiatry is just at a developing stage at the onset of the 20th century so I refrain from making further comments on Katherine's decisions. But I will definitely point out how these doctors hold Stanley hostage so they can get money and in the case of Dr. Hamilton, decent funding and resources for his study of ape sexuality and who, in Freudian fashion, theorizes that sex is the root and cause of human activity. And this whole ape study thing mirrors exactly our main character who himself is seen to be dangerous to women as demonstrated in the first few chapters while he and company are traveling on a train and suddenly Stanley attacks a young woman intent on sexually violating her.
Katherine herself is a formidable character who possesses quite an intellect reserved for educated women such as she during that time. She has her own share of injustices, being quite talented at chess that boys are beaten and eventually the group was disbanded when her male teacher "discovered an obscure prohibition against board games". How very apt and witty of Boyle to incorporate chess in this story of male incarceration and feminine energy that continues to fight for rights and love. Boyle writes: "(...) never mind that the queen was the power behind the throne and the king a poor-crippled one-hop-at-a-time beggar hardly more fit or able than a pawn, he was the object of the game and they all knew it." (p. 72)
And I have to really say how uncannily timely it is that at this time of Covid-19 pandemic, I am consuming this story as I did with Tom Robbins' Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates and its globe-trotting main character Switters, while I was on a very long vacation in Spain. With Riven Rock, I feel so much claustrophobia just imagining being locked up for the rest of your life, even though you have people who attend to your needs. Money cannot buy freedom. And yet, here we are still under lockdown with the same feeling that money cannot buy health. And did I say that the Spanish flu also featured in the novel? So just imagine how I am taken aback by all these coincidences when all I wanted was to just read a book to make good use of time. Or maybe it's the priestess in me working...
To end this post, I will have to say that while I was around 50 pages shy of finishing Riven Rock, I looked up T.C. Boyle in the Internet to answer one simple question: is he a misogynist? (I got that idea because he is one heck of a writer who really makes characters come alive and I am thinking maybe he is like O'Kane.) Only I am surprised to find that he looks like a balding Ironman, witty and charming, and is a really really cool guy, based on the interviews I have watched on Youtube. I even told Q about this book last night when he chatted me up and I asked his views on locking up mentally ill people who may become a menace to society. Always the liberal, he avoids a clear yes/no answer and even suggests that those who cannot control their urges "should be given proper care and support so that they might one day survive in the real world." Did I say that the novel also reeks of privilege and that while reading I cannot help but think what could have been the story development if we have a poor couple instead of a power couple?
"It was he very stuff of the earth's bones, solid rock, impenetrable, impermeable, the symbol of everything that endures, and here it was split in two, riven like a yard of cheap cloth, and by a thing so small and insidious as an acorn..." (p. 124)
Stanley is joined by his personal nurse Eddie O'Kane, among others, whose own story is interwoven with those of the McCormick couple. I cannot help but compare the two men. Shy, awkward, mild-mannered Stanley who is diagnosed with dementia praecox (read: sex maniac) is slowly regarded to be a danger to society after he exhibited violent behaviors. In one outing, he almost drowned a fisherman. He took a German teacher against the latter's will to Katherine's house when he is advised to study the German language to calm his nerves. He displays rude behavior when he calls his kindhearted, soft-spoken mother-in-law "a stupid old woman" inside her own home. He tries to hurt Katherine because of his paranoia that his wife is cheating on him with Butler Ames, a former suitor, when Katherine is busy with her plans in the academe. Prior to his diagnosis, Stanley is shown to be critical of capitalism, himself converting a portion of his business to a socialist venture. He is proud of such achievement and Katherine becomes attracted to him because of that.
On the other hand, O'Kane is a womanizer. For certain he is a competent man in his profession, and I can say that in his presence Stanley can be controlled for he is treated not as an employee but as a friend and confidant. I despise his character though for treating women as mere sex objects. He marries Rosaleen when she becomes pregnant with his child. And while in Riven Rock away from his wife, he seduces Giovanella who later on bears his son but is married to an old shoemaker because O'Kane is revealed to be an adulterer and therefore they cannot marry. The shoemaker dies eventually during the Spanish Flu pandemic, and later on Giovanella marries O'Kane when things become more peaceful between them. And I have to add that O'Kane physically hurt these two women, and yet he is considered to be a normal person. Maybe this is one theme of the book, of how society's standards weigh and how this distorts our views of what is right and just.
I am also amused at how Katherine will do anything to get Stanley back, even hiring psychiatrists who are obvious quacks. Then again, the field of psychiatry is just at a developing stage at the onset of the 20th century so I refrain from making further comments on Katherine's decisions. But I will definitely point out how these doctors hold Stanley hostage so they can get money and in the case of Dr. Hamilton, decent funding and resources for his study of ape sexuality and who, in Freudian fashion, theorizes that sex is the root and cause of human activity. And this whole ape study thing mirrors exactly our main character who himself is seen to be dangerous to women as demonstrated in the first few chapters while he and company are traveling on a train and suddenly Stanley attacks a young woman intent on sexually violating her.
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| Katherine's disappointment in men |
Katherine herself is a formidable character who possesses quite an intellect reserved for educated women such as she during that time. She has her own share of injustices, being quite talented at chess that boys are beaten and eventually the group was disbanded when her male teacher "discovered an obscure prohibition against board games". How very apt and witty of Boyle to incorporate chess in this story of male incarceration and feminine energy that continues to fight for rights and love. Boyle writes: "(...) never mind that the queen was the power behind the throne and the king a poor-crippled one-hop-at-a-time beggar hardly more fit or able than a pawn, he was the object of the game and they all knew it." (p. 72)
And I have to really say how uncannily timely it is that at this time of Covid-19 pandemic, I am consuming this story as I did with Tom Robbins' Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates and its globe-trotting main character Switters, while I was on a very long vacation in Spain. With Riven Rock, I feel so much claustrophobia just imagining being locked up for the rest of your life, even though you have people who attend to your needs. Money cannot buy freedom. And yet, here we are still under lockdown with the same feeling that money cannot buy health. And did I say that the Spanish flu also featured in the novel? So just imagine how I am taken aback by all these coincidences when all I wanted was to just read a book to make good use of time. Or maybe it's the priestess in me working...
To end this post, I will have to say that while I was around 50 pages shy of finishing Riven Rock, I looked up T.C. Boyle in the Internet to answer one simple question: is he a misogynist? (I got that idea because he is one heck of a writer who really makes characters come alive and I am thinking maybe he is like O'Kane.) Only I am surprised to find that he looks like a balding Ironman, witty and charming, and is a really really cool guy, based on the interviews I have watched on Youtube. I even told Q about this book last night when he chatted me up and I asked his views on locking up mentally ill people who may become a menace to society. Always the liberal, he avoids a clear yes/no answer and even suggests that those who cannot control their urges "should be given proper care and support so that they might one day survive in the real world." Did I say that the novel also reeks of privilege and that while reading I cannot help but think what could have been the story development if we have a poor couple instead of a power couple?
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