Riven Rock

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Riven Rock is a 1998 novel by the American writer T. C. Boyle . It is Boyle's seventh novel and was translated from the American by Werner Richter.

Protagonists

Katharine Dexter McCormick (left) in a National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) picture

The novel, which relates to real people, tells the story of Stanley McCormick (born November 2, 1874 in Chicago , † January 19, 1947 in Montecito ), the youngest son of Cyrus McCormick , founder of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company , and his wife Katharine McCormick (1875–1967), whom he married on September 15, 1904 in Geneva . She later became an important figure in the American women's movement . The third main character in the book is McCormick's male nurse, Edward Eddie James O'Kane, who follows Stanley McCormick's ordeal throughout.

content

The book begins four years after Stanley McCormick and Katharine Dexter's honeymoon, when Stanley McCormick moved to the family-owned Riven Rock estate in Montecito , Santa Barbara County, after health problems . This was actually built by the McCormick family for his sister, Mary Virginia, who also suffered from mental disorders . The construction management had partly drawn Stanley McCormick himself.

The life story of Stanley McCormick, who suffers from dementia praecox and schizophrenia , is told in three main chapters, which are described in epochs for the treating physicians (Dr. Hamilton, Dr. Brush and Dr. Kempf), but interrupted by retrospectives. In the first phase (Dr. Hamiliton) women are not allowed to visit Riven Rock , this will only change under Dr. Kempf when McCormick was allowed to visit his wife for the first time in twenty years. In the previous period, only telephone calls were allowed, and in the first few years the staff had been selected exclusively from men. The upbringing of his parents, Nettie and Cyrus McCormick, the mental weakness of his sister Mary Virginia and a traumatic sexual experience in Paris during a study trip had a strong influence on the protagonist's violent and misogynistic behavior .

At the same time, the book tells the story of the nurse Edward O'Kane, son of Irish immigrants, who was involved in the history of Stanley McCormick from the beginning. O'Kane experienced the move from Northwest America (Chicago and Boston) to California in 1908 and also became estranged from his wife Rosaleen and son Edward Jr., partly because of his alcoholism , partly because of his affairs with other women, here in particular Giovanella Dimucci, that he's making a child, and partly because of his dream of having his own orange tree farm .

criticism

“... It is the combination of allegorical rigor and casual style that makes" Riven Rock "outstanding. Boyle names things by their names, but not as if they are of particular interest to him or his audience. This can be beneficial for the topics covered. Werner Richter skillfully translated this tone into German. Unfortunately, he tends to doubt the author's sanity rather than his own language skills. You don't have to know that fishy also means "insincere", that to exercise elbows jokingly stands for the consumption of alcohol or that a drummer is sometimes just a traveling salesman. But you should realize that something is wrong before you tell the reader about fishy efforts, elbow-rubbing bar-goers and the cosmopolitanism of the drummers ... "

- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"..." Riven Rock "is, like all of his novels, action-intensive, exciting, varied, dynamic, burlesque and sensual. Boyle takes his reader by the hand - he can be watched while working: He shows us, so to speak, "performatively", how he constructs his novels, how he builds suspense, how he sharpens the plot and breaks it down into foreground and background, how he places and surprises the tempos changes. He shows us his means and methods - and sometimes also his sources - and so each of his novels is like a lesson in creative writing, is a textbook and applied knowledge at the same time ... "

- literaturkritik.de

“... The fact that we are nevertheless largely interested in this psychopathic hero has to do with what cannot be learned in any school or taught in any textbook and for which we still lack the right term: to name Let’s let it be the secret and the magic of storytelling .. "

- The mirror

particularities

  • The author TC Boyle himself lives in Montecito , the main location of the plot

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Armond Fields : Katharine Dexter McCormick: Pioneer for Women's Rights , p. 251
  2. ↑ cf. Fields p. 251
  3. ↑ Michael Allmeier: Tarzan's greed and unease: Unrestrained and strict enough: TC Boyle's novel "Riven Rock"
  4. ↑ Lutz Hagestedt: Schizophrenia in the Garden of Eden
  5. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Treichel: Furor a Psychopathen
  6. ↑ Online version of the article in the Frankfurter Rundschau from February 12, 2009 (Martin Scholz: TC Boyle: A friend of the cars)