Stan's Reading List

This book is about sex and madness, a topic that should have produced tragic characters in struggle of mythic proportions. The main character is the male psychiatric nurse who is one of three lifelong employees, hired to care for Stanley McCormick, the millionaire youngest son of Silas McCormick who invented and manufactured the mechanical reaper. Stanley marries an equally lustrous young woman of great wealth, Kathrine Dexter, then goes quickly insane. Uncontrollable around women of any sort, the novel opens with a middle aged Stanley institutionalized in Massachusetts and about to be moved to a secure house in Santa Barbara, California, which had been constructed to privately sequester the madness of his older sister.

Surely this book offers much opportunity to examine characters and conflicts in grand style. But the author generally fails to live up to his material, and the result is a long plodding attempt to develop the characters who remain two-dimensional through out. He is not very good at describing sexual activity and avoids the details in such scenes. He is worse at describing the treatment of insanity. For instance, the few escapes and attacks of the feared mad man generally fritter away to inane descriptions by the nurses. The few segments that are presented as first person thoughts of the insane Stanley do not carry any weight or significance to the development of plot. The long suffering Katherine, the wife who has to commit her husband and manage his affairs against the wishes of his wealthy family-- we never develop any real feel for her anguish nor her sublimated passion for worthy social causes. Apparently she dies an elderly frustrated virgin after a long marriage to a sex maniac, but even that end point is unclear. Even the ineffectual male nurse who repeatedly impregnates a young italian woman, each of them married to someone else, just dwindles away at the end of the book.

In the end, I felt like this was a long description of wasted lives. No point of sympathy or understanding for the condition of these characters is achieved beyond just surface events in their pointless lives. No grip upon the treatment of dementia praecox at the beginning of the twentieth century is gained. Just vague mentions of psychoanalysis and the talking treatment. Even less mention of glandular treatments involving monkeys, even though one of the early doctors in the book purchases a number of primates for study. I could find no preface nor epilogue to mention if these were truely historical people or purely fictive creations. Surely if the first, the author may have some excuse to be constrained by actual events so his characters can not perform the actions of outrageous drama suggested by their situations. If so, then TC Boyle can perhaps be blamed for choosing dull, plodding people as subjects. But I really suspect that it just lack of skill with characterization. There are some well written passages that show the writer's craft, but these are not enough to sustain the novel when the neither the characters nor we readers achieve any resolution or understanding of their plight. They just live in wealth and misery and die of old age at the end.