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
Bob Stevenson
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.
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Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781942658177
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781942658160
Richard Wiley discusses writing and his novel Bob Stevenson with the Tacoma Weekly.
Richard Wiley is the author of Tacoma Stories and eight novels including Bob Stevenson; Soldiers in Hiding, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Washington State Book Award; and Ahmed’s Revenge, winner of the Maria Thomas Fiction Award. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he divides his time between Los Angeles, California, and Tacoma, Washington.
visit author page »Praise for Bob Stevenson
Through a clever use of dissociative identity disorder, [Bob Stevenson] provides an exploration of the workings of the human mind, its pathology, and its machination to make up stories. . . . This novel of identities within identities, selves within selves ends on a note of the unknowns and uncertainties of life. The question of identity and the self prevails as the key matter in the novel, whether based on a figment of a pathological mind or on a membership to a genealogy.
Clever. . . . 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.
— Publishers Weekly
I love books that start out with someone making a colossal mistake. This starts with a great one—Dr. Ruby Okada unknowingly falls in love with a man escaping from her psychiatric hospital. The beauty of this slim novel is the way in which the ‘how’ and ‘why’ is all tangled into a quirky puzzle with the ‘so, what happens next?’ I had SO much fun de-tangling.