Bob Stevenson
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
“A witty, roller-coaster ride of uncertain identity set against the gritty certainties of New York City. In compelling, unadorned prose, Richard Wiley gives us a bewitching and ultimately moving tale.” —Caryl Phillips, author of A Distant Shore and The Lost Child
Dr. Ruby Okada meets a charming man with a Scottish accent in the elevator of her psychiatric hospital. Unaware that he is an escaping patient, she falls under his spell, and her life and his are changed forever by the time they get to the street.
Who is the mysterious man? Is he Archie B. Billingsly, suffering from dissociative identity disorder and subject to brilliant flights of fancy and bizarre, violent fits? Or is he the reincarnation of Robert Louis Stevenson, back to haunt New York as Long John Silver and Mr. Edward Hyde? Her career compromised, Ruby soon learns that her future and that of her unborn child depend on finding the key to his identity.
With compelling psychological descriptions and terrifying, ineffable transformations, Bob Stevenson is an ingenious tale featuring a quirky cast of characters drawn together by mutual fascination, need, and finally, love.
Richard Wiley is the author of eight novels including Soldiers in Hiding, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and Ahmed’s Revenge, winner of the Maria Thomas Fiction Award. Professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he divides his time between Los Angeles, California and Tacoma, Washington.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It is a truism that writers live on through their works, but Wiley's (Soldiers in Hiding) clever latest considers the strange case of a classic author reanimated by other means. Ruby Okada is a psychiatrist swept off her feet by "Bob," an enigmatic stranger spouting orotund phrases in a Scottish brogue. Their brief affair concludes when she finally discovers that her lover is really Archie Billingsly, a psychiatric patient prone to fugue states in which he convincingly takes on the identities of Robert Louis Stevenson and his most famous creation, Henry Hyde, among others. Mortified that she has "fallen so deeply in love with a lie and a ghost," and pregnant with Bob/Archie's child, Ruby delves into the curious case of a man as "sick and fractured" as Dr. Jekyll. Wiley skillfully balances the psychological explanations for Archie's strange behavior with the more fanciful notion that he has been possessed by Stevenson's spirit, one of those "metaphysical rovers" seeking out corporeal forms. It's an elegant conceit around which to craft a tale about the ambiguities of character, but the novel slackens considerably in the second half. Moreover, the supporting characters don't manage to bewitch the reader as completely as the great Scotsman does through Archie.
