History’s Rewrite Man

Tall and wiry, with a vandyke beard and hair like spun sugar, rising in a frizzy blond cloud above his head, T. Coraghessan Boyle appears very much a contemporary personality, answering the door of his Montecito home wearing earrings, jeans and high-top sneakers, like some kind of literary rock star. Once the 49-year-old author climbs into his red BMW, however, and begins to drive through the hills of Montecito, another, more fundamental imperative begins to come clear. What Boyle sees here, after all, is history, a subject that resides at the heart of his seventh novel, “Riven Rock” (Viking), which takes place during the early part of the 20th century.

In some sense, Montecito, south of Santa Barbara, is a perfect place to write about history, since so much of it continues to linger in these hills. For the last four years, ever since he made the move from Woodland Hills, Boyle has lived with his wife and three children in a 1909 Frank Lloyd Wright house--”the first Frank Lloyd Wright house in California,” he exclaims--and only a short distance up the road are what remains of a number of estates constructed around the turn of the century by the robber barons and industrial tycoons who first put this community on the map.

Although most of these properties have long since been subdivided, there is still an aura of gentility that marks them, a breath of money in the air. As he drives, Boyle identifies a wooded copse that used to belong to one estate and talks about the landscaped gardens and big stone houses, some of which remain intact, like survivors from another world.

Boyle’s new novel unfolds in Riven Rock, the estate built by the McCormick family of Chicago, whose patriarch, Cyrus, invented the power reaper in 1831. It’s the story of Stanley McCormick, Cyrus’ youngest son, who not long after his 1904 marriage to Katherine Dexter suffered a schizophrenic breakdown and spent the rest of his life sequestered at Riven Rock. The book mixes fact and fantasy, reality and invention, to recount the first 20 years of Stanley’s convalescence, when he was isolated from women because of the violent sexual aggressiveness their presence provoked.

“Not long after we moved here,” Boyle says of the novel’s genesis, “my wife bought a book about the great estates of this area, and in one part, there was the story of Stanley, with pictures, the whole schmear. Around the same time, there was an article in the News-Press, our local newspaper, about Stanley, with a big picture of him that I had on my wall throughout the writing of the book. I was already kind of fascinated by what was around me and wanted to find out more. Each of these estates has a bizarre story connected with it, but this is the most bizarre.”

Even at the start of Boyle’s career, he sought to merge truth and imagination in the service of something that might encompass them both. His earliest book, the 1979 collection “Descent of Man,” features stories like ‘We Are Norsemen” and “John Barleycorn Lives” that take as their starting point some specific historical moment, and many of his novels operate from a similar framework, merging what the author calls his “wise guy, hyperbolic sense of humor” with a narrative that has roots in real life.

“Water Music,” for instance, revolves, in part, around Mungo Park, the 18th century Scottish explorer who discovered Africa’s Niger River, while both “World’s End” and “The Road to Wellville” take on the mythic patterns of America, delving into the past to uncover something about the way we live today.

“How did we get here?” Boyle asks. “That’s the fascinating thing about history, and about writing historical novels. That’s why history interests me. I don’t know what’s coming, but at least I can look back and see that something happened before.”

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Where “Riven Rock” differs from Boyle’s previous historical novels is in the degree to which it reflects some kind of documentary truth. Unlike, say, “The Road to Wellville,” which uses real people to populate an invented story, or even “Water Music,” where, as Boyle says, “I couldn’t violate the facts of Mungo Park’s life, but I could invent a character like Ned Rise to go along with him,” “Riven Rock” is, in its author’s words, “a ready-made story--it’s all true.” This, of course, presents its own set of challenges.

“When word of this got out,” Boyle recalls, “I did a brief interview with the Montecito Journal, and I said, essentially, ‘I’m writing this story, and the amazing thing is that Stanley never saw a woman for 20 years.’ Well, people began to write letters to the paper, saying, ‘Boyle is wrong. What does he know? Stanley did see women.’ I replied in this way: I doubt very much if anybody’s alive who knew Stanley during his difficult period--that means 1928 and before. Yes, he did see women in his later years, as I indicate; he didn’t die until 1948. He had calmed down, he had a female secretary in the house. But we don’t deal with those years. And whether people know the facts or not, don’t forget: I’m writing fiction. And fiction always tells the absolute, unvarnished truth because only I know it.”

Boyle may be joking about that last part, but the idea that fiction can illuminate something about history is one he holds close to his heart.

“Every time I write a book,” he says, “or even a story, it gives me an excuse for learning about something.” In “Riven Rock,” this has as much to do with animating his characters as it does with uncovering the actual circumstances of their lives.

“When I first started writing,” he notes, “I was much more interested in designs and concepts and ideas and humor than I was in character. I think, though, that as I’ve become a novelist, I’ve begun to mine this new toy of character, which I didn’t use much before.”

That’s a telling statement, for if Boyle has a weakness, it’s his tendency to rely on characters who are less flesh-and-blood figures than archetypal symbols of some idea. Here, however, he uses history as a frame to look at individual connections, rather than the broad associations of the past. That’s not only true of Stanley, but the book’s other two protagonists--Eddie O’Kane, who starts out as Stanley’s nurse, only to become something more like a friend, and Katherine, a suffragette and birth-control activist who pursues her own agenda while never losing hope that one day she and Stanley will lead a normal life.

“You couldn’t find a more dysfunctional marriage,” Boyle says. “That’s ground zero. It’s one of the things that attracted me to the story actually because I knew it would enable me to talk about the division of the sexes. But another interesting aspect of the story is Katherine’s level of dedication. In some ways, it’s an ideal, but you can contrast it with the reality, and what the cost was. Katherine was totally loyal to Stanley. Her house downtown, which she built, is now a community center, and one part of it is a huge room with gymnasium equipment that was set up for Stanley. Didn’t she get it? He’s not coming over. But it was a testimony to her strength and fidelity that she kept at it.”

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The same, of course, might be said of Boyle himself, for whom “Riven Rock” is something of a return to form after a couple of books--”Without a Hero” and ‘The Tortilla Curtain”--that lack the bite and inventiveness of his finest efforts. His next project is a contemporary novel about “environmental degradation, the environmental movement, ecoterrorism-- all sorts of rich subjects,” which he is researching now. He will also continue to teach writing at USC, which he enjoys, he laughs, “because I want to be the dictator.”

In the meantime, Boyle’s interest in history will take a decidedly personal slant this fall when Viking Penguin releases his collected stories (there are 66 of them) in a massive retrospective. It’s a decision, Boyle admits, with which he’s not altogether comfortable, especially since, as he says, “I don’t want to go backwards.” Ultimately, Boyle suggests, it all comes down to storytelling, whether with short fiction or the textures of a big book like “Riven Rock.”

“My whole life is telling stories,” he says. “Who am I? What am I doing? Who are we? I just tell stories to try to get ahold of that.” The key, in his view, is that “whether the story is purely invented, or it’s based on an historical character like Stanley, where I have the general outline of his life, it’s really the same exercise, which is to dramatize it. That’s what’s fascinating about writing fiction. You have to invent a structure. It’s like a big puzzle. Where do you come into it? And where do you end it? Why do you lay down these images? How are they going to resolve themselves? And it’s very satisfying if and when they do.”