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Bob Stevenson
“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.
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.
224 pages, Paperback
First published October 11, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
January 30, 2019
What an interesting read. A woman who considers herself to be mentally fit falls in love with a man who is charming and attentive to her, and then learns the man is considered dangerously mentally ill. That sounds very heavy but this is actually a very playful book. It's not disrespectful of mental illness--but it just allows this relationship to happen. The feelings I had while reading the novel ranged from amused to discomfited. Each scene feels nearly-normal in action and tone and scene, and yet, as you get deeper into the scene, you realize it really is not normal at all. What people say is slightly off. What they observe is random and not pertinent to the story. What is reported by the writer/narrator/pov character is always a little off, not square but skewed somehow. In terms of the reading experience it reminds me most of Jane Bowles but it is really quite unique. I'm very glad to have read it.
May 31, 2016
3.5 Stars
In this very quirky story Dr. Ruby Okada, a psychiatrist, meets a handsomely attired man in a tweed jacket, at the elevator of the hospital where she works. Attractive and charismatic with a Scottish accent, she takes him for a visitor. A whirlwind romance, quite out of character for Dr. Ruby Okada, seems to follow this chance encounter, when she finds herself head over heels in love with Bob Stephenson. Like many before her, she comes to find out that he isn’t exactly who she thought he was many months later. First, he was not a visitor, but a patient of one of her co-workers. Foremost, apparently there’s a good reason for his patient status.
Humiliated, after all what kind of a psychiatrist can she be if she couldn’t even see the signs, she resigns around the time her tummy begins to swell with the growing evidence of their mutual love. Opening up a new practice, solo, in a building that Bob Stephenson’s family has owned, and lived in, for a few generations. She remains determined to fix Bob. Or is it Archie? Archie B. Billingsly? It’s a mystery who he really is.
With a somewhat peculiar and unpredictable cast of characters (other than the many men who share the same body with Bob), this may be the most original love story I’ve read.
Pub Date: 11 October 2016
Many thanks to Bellevue Literary Press, Edelweiss, and to author Richard Wiley for providing me with an advanced copy.
In this very quirky story Dr. Ruby Okada, a psychiatrist, meets a handsomely attired man in a tweed jacket, at the elevator of the hospital where she works. Attractive and charismatic with a Scottish accent, she takes him for a visitor. A whirlwind romance, quite out of character for Dr. Ruby Okada, seems to follow this chance encounter, when she finds herself head over heels in love with Bob Stephenson. Like many before her, she comes to find out that he isn’t exactly who she thought he was many months later. First, he was not a visitor, but a patient of one of her co-workers. Foremost, apparently there’s a good reason for his patient status.
Humiliated, after all what kind of a psychiatrist can she be if she couldn’t even see the signs, she resigns around the time her tummy begins to swell with the growing evidence of their mutual love. Opening up a new practice, solo, in a building that Bob Stephenson’s family has owned, and lived in, for a few generations. She remains determined to fix Bob. Or is it Archie? Archie B. Billingsly? It’s a mystery who he really is.
With a somewhat peculiar and unpredictable cast of characters (other than the many men who share the same body with Bob), this may be the most original love story I’ve read.
Pub Date: 11 October 2016
Many thanks to Bellevue Literary Press, Edelweiss, and to author Richard Wiley for providing me with an advanced copy.
July 23, 2016
This is one of those books that refuses to be pigeonholed.
Not a read you can skim through.
What made the book interesting for me were the many characters. Some of whom occupied the same body. Relationships are unclear. Missing pieces make it difficult to piece things together. Or even feel reliable as new information keeps changing the game.
This won't be everyone's cup of tea but I enjoyed it as I'm particularly fascinated with Disassociative Identity Disorder (formally known as multiple personalities).
Thank you to the publisher for the free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Not a read you can skim through.
What made the book interesting for me were the many characters. Some of whom occupied the same body. Relationships are unclear. Missing pieces make it difficult to piece things together. Or even feel reliable as new information keeps changing the game.
This won't be everyone's cup of tea but I enjoyed it as I'm particularly fascinated with Disassociative Identity Disorder (formally known as multiple personalities).
Thank you to the publisher for the free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
August 21, 2016
I really need to think about this before I rate it ... I'm torn
Read
June 24, 2022Dr. Ruby Okada meets Arthur Billingsley, a charming man with a Scottish accent as she is leaving the psych hospital where she works. Later that year, she is in the the living room getting ready to deliver their son & uncovering the many facts of Archie's disassociative disorder. He becomes any of several characters in or authors of passages he was forced to read as a child. With the help of her friend & colleague, an attorney who has managed Billingsley's affairs for years, and her father, Ruby helps Arthur rid himself of the multiple personalities so he can be a father to his son.
December 14, 2018
Not bad, just underwhelming, the most interesting characters are sidelined and the story doesn't venture far from the description on the back.
March 11, 2020
Frankly, I read the book because of the name. How could I not? Lovely prose; a bit of unnecessary vulgarity; beautiful character development.
September 15, 2016
Bob Stevenson is a clever engaging kaleidoscopic romp into a world that feels fresh and newly created complete with a cast of engaging quirky characters draw you in. Author Richard Wiley unceremoniously dumps into the middle of this world, leaving you breathless and running to catch up. It’s not unpleasant but rather giddy and wild, and so you must say yes, okay, and dive into the middle of the tumult.
Ruby Okada is a psychiatrist who meets an affable if off-beat Scottish bloke at the elevators of the hospital where she works. The ensuing conversation is so original and inventive it sparks from the page. Four pages later, she’s pregnant and resigning from the hospital, and you’re still running to catch up.
You do. You will. But you have to hang on.
The characters in this book are not only three dimensional, but four. Quirky and human and fun. There’s the lovely Ruby who keeps expanding to bursting until the child is finally born; the delightful Gerard who has Down’s syndrome and is as tall as he is wide coming equipped with wondrous and fitting expressions; Ruby’s friend and colleague Bette who is as down to earth as Ruby is airy; the lawyer and British gent Utterson derived as are many of the characters you will meant from Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruby’s father, an avant-garde artist, and, of course, Bob/Archie and his long parade of Stevenson characters such as Jekyll and Hyde and the amalgam Henry Hyde as well as Long John Silver and a personal favorite of mine, young Jim Hawkins from Treasure Island.
This book is bursting with literary allusions that will take you back to your childhood and make you feel smart because you remember them; and it’s filled with wonderful heart-warming characters that burst from the pages, and wild incidents that leave you breathless. You turn the pages to see what will happen next to this crazy cast of colorful people tossed into this rushing river you’ve dipped into.
And herein lies the problem.
Because as enchanting as this creation is, as grateful as you are to have been swept away by this zany fever—you start asking yourself…and?
Packed into this little book—and it is little – smaller than most paperbacks and a mere 219 pages is an enormous hunk of humanity—and not without the woes – much like Dickens’s ghosts and abandoned children. For Bob/Archie Billingsly, we learn, comes from a lifetime of pain. Ruby fell deeply in love with Bob – but Bob is gone—disappeared somewhere inside Archie’s madness. Or is it madness? Is it dissociative disorder—once known as multiple personality disorder, or is it an elaborate escape mechanism.
As clever and inviting as Wiley makes the characters and the incidents and the allusions, I wanted, finally, to see the human story. He is quite successful with this as regards Gerard. But he skims past the love story of Ruby and Bob. One moment they are engaging in perhaps one of the best written first conversations I have ever read and the next it is seven months later and she is pregnant, without a job, and abandoned. Huh? They spent three weeks together. I would have liked to have seen, felt, tasted, known that love. Without that—I don’t know quite what to root for.
The same holds true for Bob/Archie. We are given an idea of a lonely abusive childhood. But who was Bob? Who was Bob in love? And who is Archie?
I don’t want to do a spoiler – but we spend a long time to come to an inevitable end—and I was left certain, but unmoved. Glad, but without a pulse quickening.
Having said that – buy this book. It is worth the journey. Beautifully, simply written. Fun, wild, crazy. A journey back to the best of your childhood. And with characters—both Stevenson’s and Wiley’s you will never forget.
Ruby Okada is a psychiatrist who meets an affable if off-beat Scottish bloke at the elevators of the hospital where she works. The ensuing conversation is so original and inventive it sparks from the page. Four pages later, she’s pregnant and resigning from the hospital, and you’re still running to catch up.
You do. You will. But you have to hang on.
The characters in this book are not only three dimensional, but four. Quirky and human and fun. There’s the lovely Ruby who keeps expanding to bursting until the child is finally born; the delightful Gerard who has Down’s syndrome and is as tall as he is wide coming equipped with wondrous and fitting expressions; Ruby’s friend and colleague Bette who is as down to earth as Ruby is airy; the lawyer and British gent Utterson derived as are many of the characters you will meant from Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruby’s father, an avant-garde artist, and, of course, Bob/Archie and his long parade of Stevenson characters such as Jekyll and Hyde and the amalgam Henry Hyde as well as Long John Silver and a personal favorite of mine, young Jim Hawkins from Treasure Island.
This book is bursting with literary allusions that will take you back to your childhood and make you feel smart because you remember them; and it’s filled with wonderful heart-warming characters that burst from the pages, and wild incidents that leave you breathless. You turn the pages to see what will happen next to this crazy cast of colorful people tossed into this rushing river you’ve dipped into.
And herein lies the problem.
Because as enchanting as this creation is, as grateful as you are to have been swept away by this zany fever—you start asking yourself…and?
Packed into this little book—and it is little – smaller than most paperbacks and a mere 219 pages is an enormous hunk of humanity—and not without the woes – much like Dickens’s ghosts and abandoned children. For Bob/Archie Billingsly, we learn, comes from a lifetime of pain. Ruby fell deeply in love with Bob – but Bob is gone—disappeared somewhere inside Archie’s madness. Or is it madness? Is it dissociative disorder—once known as multiple personality disorder, or is it an elaborate escape mechanism.
As clever and inviting as Wiley makes the characters and the incidents and the allusions, I wanted, finally, to see the human story. He is quite successful with this as regards Gerard. But he skims past the love story of Ruby and Bob. One moment they are engaging in perhaps one of the best written first conversations I have ever read and the next it is seven months later and she is pregnant, without a job, and abandoned. Huh? They spent three weeks together. I would have liked to have seen, felt, tasted, known that love. Without that—I don’t know quite what to root for.
The same holds true for Bob/Archie. We are given an idea of a lonely abusive childhood. But who was Bob? Who was Bob in love? And who is Archie?
I don’t want to do a spoiler – but we spend a long time to come to an inevitable end—and I was left certain, but unmoved. Glad, but without a pulse quickening.
Having said that – buy this book. It is worth the journey. Beautifully, simply written. Fun, wild, crazy. A journey back to the best of your childhood. And with characters—both Stevenson’s and Wiley’s you will never forget.
October 3, 2016
I received an ARC in exchange for an honest and fair review.
This book was many things. Fascinating, original, somewhat confusing, and incredibly well written. I'm quite familiar with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder), as I spent a decent amount of time in a Clinic that specializes in treatment of DID and DD (Dissociative Disorder).
The story begins with Dr. Ruby Okada sharing the elevator with a man as she's leaving the psychiatric hospital where she works. She's immediately drawn to him, inexplicably so. She's compelled to keep talking to him, to stay in his presence, while not being able to put her finger on exactly why she's so taken with him or why he won't answer her when she asks who he is. From there, the story jumps to seven months later, with Ruby pregnant with the man in question's child.
From there we learn that the man in question is known by many names, and personalities. The man Ruby fell in love with goes by the name of Bob, but he also manifests the personalities of Archie B Billingsly, Edward Hyde, Long John Silver, Dr. Livesey, and others. The majority of the book, he insists that he is Robert (Bob) Louis Stevenson, no longer dead (reincarnated, I suppose). His many personalities are at times hard to follow, as their appearances are brief and almost unexplained. I'm usually not a fan of books with flashbacks, I find them jarring if they're not done well enough and honestly, I just don't like them. They annoy me. But in this book, I think flashbacks would have helped immensely. It was confusing to follow Ruby's struggle to crack the case of who exactly the man she fell for and conceived a child with is without having any of Ruby's memories of the weeks she spent with Bob. Even if they were just a page long, I think it would have helped to know the man she is comparing all of the other personalities to. It's hard to look for someone if you don't know who you're looking for. (That makes sense, right?)
I thought the writing itself was wonderful. The characters were well developed and the dialogue flowed. This book is filled with complex characters and an incredibly hard to describe plot, yet it was easy to read and quite fun. I really enjoyed it. There is the slightest hint of the magical that made this book special and I'm very glad I read it.
This book was many things. Fascinating, original, somewhat confusing, and incredibly well written. I'm quite familiar with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder), as I spent a decent amount of time in a Clinic that specializes in treatment of DID and DD (Dissociative Disorder).
The story begins with Dr. Ruby Okada sharing the elevator with a man as she's leaving the psychiatric hospital where she works. She's immediately drawn to him, inexplicably so. She's compelled to keep talking to him, to stay in his presence, while not being able to put her finger on exactly why she's so taken with him or why he won't answer her when she asks who he is. From there, the story jumps to seven months later, with Ruby pregnant with the man in question's child.
From there we learn that the man in question is known by many names, and personalities. The man Ruby fell in love with goes by the name of Bob, but he also manifests the personalities of Archie B Billingsly, Edward Hyde, Long John Silver, Dr. Livesey, and others. The majority of the book, he insists that he is Robert (Bob) Louis Stevenson, no longer dead (reincarnated, I suppose). His many personalities are at times hard to follow, as their appearances are brief and almost unexplained. I'm usually not a fan of books with flashbacks, I find them jarring if they're not done well enough and honestly, I just don't like them. They annoy me. But in this book, I think flashbacks would have helped immensely. It was confusing to follow Ruby's struggle to crack the case of who exactly the man she fell for and conceived a child with is without having any of Ruby's memories of the weeks she spent with Bob. Even if they were just a page long, I think it would have helped to know the man she is comparing all of the other personalities to. It's hard to look for someone if you don't know who you're looking for. (That makes sense, right?)
I thought the writing itself was wonderful. The characters were well developed and the dialogue flowed. This book is filled with complex characters and an incredibly hard to describe plot, yet it was easy to read and quite fun. I really enjoyed it. There is the slightest hint of the magical that made this book special and I'm very glad I read it.
October 12, 2016
I received this book as an ARC in exchange for an honest review... so here it is. I've not yet finished it. But as it came out today I thought I should say something about it. I've only read about 20 pages, it's a short book, yet those few pages seemingly took hours to read. Now normally I like to give a book a chance and don't allow myself to give up until after 50 pages, but every time I think about going back to this book I shudder.
First off, there is hardly any backstory, things are just happening. Of course these may be visited later but I'm just not willing to go through all these pages for that. Another thing, the big thing, was the voices. I hated it. The characters don't talk like people. It's all so programmed. It's like the author was trying to make every interaction profound and it just wasn't.
I wanted to like this book. I was so happy when I got a copy, but I truly cannot finish it right now, if ever. So I have to give it a 1. Maybe, hopefully, it get's better; after all I'm seeing 4 and 5 star reviews. But for what I read I just cannot justify giving it the benefit of the doubt and going with a middle rating, and I'm pretty lenient about these things usually. It just wasn't captivating and if I were to have met Ruby in real life, I'd probably want to hit her every time she opened her mouth, or any time she had a thought for that matter. She was just so annoying. The 23 pages I read were just. so. annoying.
First off, there is hardly any backstory, things are just happening. Of course these may be visited later but I'm just not willing to go through all these pages for that. Another thing, the big thing, was the voices. I hated it. The characters don't talk like people. It's all so programmed. It's like the author was trying to make every interaction profound and it just wasn't.
I wanted to like this book. I was so happy when I got a copy, but I truly cannot finish it right now, if ever. So I have to give it a 1. Maybe, hopefully, it get's better; after all I'm seeing 4 and 5 star reviews. But for what I read I just cannot justify giving it the benefit of the doubt and going with a middle rating, and I'm pretty lenient about these things usually. It just wasn't captivating and if I were to have met Ruby in real life, I'd probably want to hit her every time she opened her mouth, or any time she had a thought for that matter. She was just so annoying. The 23 pages I read were just. so. annoying.
September 4, 2016
I received a free advanced copy of this book from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program in exchange for an honest review.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I didn't really enjoy this book. It was okay and quite short, so I was able to finish it before I felt like it wasn't worth my time. And honestly, it's short length is one of my complaints even though I wasn't fully absorbed into the book. I felt that it was incredibly rushed and could have benefited from more length. Part of my discomfort with it was that so much happened in approximately 200 (small) pages. It needed to be much longer to accommodate everything it did. It also needed some extra explanation, I thought. The book began in medias res and hardly ever provided flashbacks or background information to allow the reader to know how everyone got there.
I also felt that the author forced words out of his character's mouths that weren't fitting. They often said things that were deep and profound and cryptic. This is okay here and there, but it was so frequent that the dialogue truly felt unrealistic to me much of the time.
The idea, however, is a good one and that was enough to keep me reading. I wouldn't say this book was terrible, by any means. It just wasn't for me. I probably won't pass it along, either, but there's a chance that I will encounter someone with whom I think it fits.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I didn't really enjoy this book. It was okay and quite short, so I was able to finish it before I felt like it wasn't worth my time. And honestly, it's short length is one of my complaints even though I wasn't fully absorbed into the book. I felt that it was incredibly rushed and could have benefited from more length. Part of my discomfort with it was that so much happened in approximately 200 (small) pages. It needed to be much longer to accommodate everything it did. It also needed some extra explanation, I thought. The book began in medias res and hardly ever provided flashbacks or background information to allow the reader to know how everyone got there.
I also felt that the author forced words out of his character's mouths that weren't fitting. They often said things that were deep and profound and cryptic. This is okay here and there, but it was so frequent that the dialogue truly felt unrealistic to me much of the time.
The idea, however, is a good one and that was enough to keep me reading. I wouldn't say this book was terrible, by any means. It just wasn't for me. I probably won't pass it along, either, but there's a chance that I will encounter someone with whom I think it fits.
February 4, 2017
I'm approaching my 300th book of the year (It's Sept.) and I bet I haven't given a dozen books five stars. But Bob Stevenson deserves it. Heck, I'd probably give it five stars for Gerard alone, who has to be the cutest, most genuine character I've read in a while. He was a true pleasure to read and I adored the way people accepted him into their lives and loved him too.
But the rest of the characters were of interest as well. Ruby, who finds herself in a baffling and embarrassing situation. Archie/Bob who is fighting his own demons. Dr. Utterson and Bette, who provide the necessary sidekicks, along with Dad and the nun. All engaging in their own way. Granted, you never get to know them deeply, but they fulfill their role succinctly.
The writing is marvelous. I laughed repeatedly at the dry humor. The fact that you're never wholly sure where the surreal stops and the actual paranormal might pick up kept me biting my nails. Lastly, I was thrilled to see non-white main characters and people successfully functioning with disabilities. All in all, a real winner for me.
Note: I won a copy on LibraryThing.
But the rest of the characters were of interest as well. Ruby, who finds herself in a baffling and embarrassing situation. Archie/Bob who is fighting his own demons. Dr. Utterson and Bette, who provide the necessary sidekicks, along with Dad and the nun. All engaging in their own way. Granted, you never get to know them deeply, but they fulfill their role succinctly.
The writing is marvelous. I laughed repeatedly at the dry humor. The fact that you're never wholly sure where the surreal stops and the actual paranormal might pick up kept me biting my nails. Lastly, I was thrilled to see non-white main characters and people successfully functioning with disabilities. All in all, a real winner for me.
Note: I won a copy on LibraryThing.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews