OF MADNESS AND A DIFFERENT KIND OF LOVE TRIANGLE

Author: By Paul Kafka

Date: SUNDAY, January 18, 1998

Page: L2

Section: Books

Yet ``Riven Rock'' is as romantic as it is informative, as colorful as it is convincing. Boyle's imagination is fueled, as always, first by his instinct for locating and exploring bedeviling human predicaments, and second, by his amateur historian's delight in the re-creation of bygone times and ways. As in ``The Road to Wellville,'' Boyle's characters step out of their period costumes to command our attention and affection. We want to know what happens to them, and we believe in the worlds they inhabit.

This newest novel opens with Katherine Dexter's decision to remove her husband from McLean Hospital, together with his doctor, Dr. Gilbert Hamilton, and his nurses, O'Kane and three others, in order to set Stanley up in his own private asylum. Stanley and his entourage travel by rail across the country to Santa Barbara, Calif. For Eddie, who leaves a nagging wife behind in Boston, California holds a promise of freedom and prosperity. Hamilton, the first in a succession of physicians given charge of Stanley, is interested in primate sexuality, and the new setup allows him to establish a monkey lab on the grounds of the Riven Rock estate. Here Boyle plays a variation on a theme from his previous works, that of the divergent perspectives of the rich and the poor man, the master and the servant. Eddie, stuck between a rock and a hard place, answers both to the wealthy and imperious Katherine Dexter and to the ape-happy and sexually focused Dr. Hamilton.

In a series of deft and poignant flashbacks, Boyle shows Katherine falling in love with the handsome, accomplished young Stanley McCormick of the Chicago McCormicks. Driving a motorcar in the early days of the horseless carriage, achieving dazzling speeds of up to 30 miles an hour, Stanley appears out of nowhere to rescue Katherine from the tedium of being the smartest person on holiday in Beverly, Mass.:

``In the morning, at first light, he was outside her door, rapping. He needed to talk to her, but he didn't want to disturb her, didn't want to spoil her sleep or upset her schedule . . . so he rapped gently. Very gently. So gently he could barely detect the sound himself. . . . When that got no reaction he began to thump the door with the heel of his hand, louder and progressively louder, until finally he forgot himself all together and he was boxing with that mute stubborn unreasoning slab of wood, left/right, left/right, and he set up such a racket that the janitor came running with his mop and an old woman in a cap poked her head out of the next door. . . . `Shhhhh!' she hissed. `Get away from there now. Are you crazy?' ''

Privy as we are to the flights of Stanley's mind, we follow this courtship with sympathy and dread. Scarred by a tyrannical father and a domineering mother, shadowed by the experience of an older sister who became psychotic herself, Stanley reaches out to Katherine as if her love can save him. A disastrous honeymoon and the troubled months that follow put an end to such rosy illusion.

Yet ``Riven Rock'' is not a bleak book. It is instead the story of three individuals who help each other to survive, and who try to make something of their lives. Katherine spends her time, and her family fortune combined with Stanley's, trying to further the cause of women's suffrage. She and her political companions are, through Boyle's lens, neither comical nor quaint, as suffragettes are so often figured in American histories. Katherine is a shrewd fighter and political pragmatist, as well as a visionary.

Eddie O'Kane, too, takes ``Riven Rock'' out of the confines of the asylum. O'Kane is a good-time Charlie with a heart of alloyed gold, who struggles with the temptations of drink and venery, and who emerges in the course of the novel as a genuine friend to poor, mad Stanley. He and Stanley spend the daylight hours of every day together for most of their adult lives. This creates an intimacy between them that surpasses Stanley's rapport with his psychiatrists, a couple of whom pass a mere half-decade at Riven Rock. Stanley suffers terribly, and fails again and again at achieving the ordinary goals of washing and dressing himself, of conversation with others. But we also see Stanley in health -- a gifted athlete, a liberal thinker, and a wit. We come to view him as a man robbed of the good fortune that is rightfully his. The one treasure that remains his is Katherine, who never abandons him. Throughout the decades of his confinement, Katherine stays as near to Stanley as his doctors will allow, sometimes glimpsing her husband only when he takes a daily walk on his caged balcony, sometimes speaking to him for a few minutes by telephone, from downstairs in the mansion.

``Riven Rock'' is not the most boisterously adventurous of T. C. Boyle's books, nor is it the most historically ambitious. But one senses a new composure in the author, a confidence that takes the form of restraint. In ``Water Music,'' Boyle led us on a rollicking search for the source of the Nile; in ``World's End,'' he attempted a multigenerational history of New York State, from the colonial to the modern. In ``Riven Rock,'' Boyle confines himself to the experiences of two men and one woman, and almost incidentally casts light on several decades of American social history. This relatively modest scope permits the central story, the story of a couple destined to love but never to touch, to flower in all of its sad beauty.