The Women

Frank Lloyd Wright was a genius who changed the way we think of architecture--and execute it. But his free spirit that allowed him to break the rules, also caused him to flaunt other traditions and to clash time and again with the mores of his time. Narrated through the Japanese apprentice, Boyle can also step back and give the reader detailed expositions that would have been otherwise clumsy when telling the stories of each of Frank's women. With a strong prose and sure-pen, Boyle does a marvelous job of staying inside each of these women's head as he takes the reader on the journey of each relationship. Contributing to the success of this novel, no doubt, is Wright's own choice of women: On one end there is Mamah, the intellectual, an early feminist with sensitivities that had taken another half-a-century to become more widely understood, and a few more decades before entering the public mainstream. Then there is Miriam, a charming, drug-addicted woman with a heady combination of sexuality and eccentrics, the lust for whom Wright paid heavily years later. I found most interesting Boyle's structuring of the novel as he narrates it backward, starting with Wright's last marriage and going back in time, while almost each woman encroaches on the life of the one preceding her. Nancy Horan, in "Loving Frank" did a fabulous job of detailing the romantic and dramatic relationship between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney. In T. C. Boyle's novel, the reader gets to place that one story in perspective of the architect's long life.

I loved this book and am becoming very intrigued by the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. Who knew that this amazingly talented man was so egotistical and self-centered? He certainly was a charmer with women, investors, and just anyone he met. I also recommend reading Loving Frank by Nancy Horan. It is exclusively about his relationship with Mamah Borthwick. A twisted, tangled, compelling love story about two people taking on the conventional world of marriage and family in a very conservative time. I don't know that I agree with the way they went about things, but they truly did love each other.

This is a most interesting novel with a lot of historical data included about the life and profession of Frank Lloyd Wright. It is, however, never dry or boring. The imagery is crisp and the story makes one want to go explore these homes and settings. It is in many ways a tragedy, but when is true genius not? The characters are finely drawn and full of life with all the fury and joy of passion as well as pathos that often threads through lives fully lived.

I'm not a Frank Lloyd Wright aficionado, but since I live in the Midwest, I was interested in reading this after it received a starred review in PW. I've also never read a T.C. Boyle book, but I really like how he created the "characters." He really develops a vivid portrait of each person's positives and negatives. I think it's clever to arrange the book in a reverse timeframe, so you develop your own idea of who Wright's earlier wives/mistresses were, then the author delivers a whole part devoted to her. Before reading, I also had the impression that Wright was a very" successful" man, but Boyle does a great job illustrating that Wright was gifted, but struggled with finances and egotism. I took this book with me everywhere - even in hardcover - so I could steal a few minutes reading before meetings and appointments.

Frank Lloyd Wright's turbulently scandalous love life is novelized with flamboyant style by T. C. Boyle in The Women: A Novel. As a literary device, Boyle invents a Japanese apprentice of Wright's, Sato Tadashi, who "slaved" at Taliesin in the 1930s. Tadashi acts as a host to guide readers into Wright's complicated, overlapping relations with three wives and a mistress. Writing from Japan in 1979, Tadashi introduces and footnotes sections featuring Olgivanna Milanoff Wright, Miriam Noel Wright, and Mamah Borthwick Cheney with his own recollections about life with "Wrieto-San." He says he knows there will be complaints about the interpretations of people and events. And he isn't sure he really knew Wright: "Was he the wounded genius or the philanderer and sociopath who abused the trust of practically everyone he knew, especially the women, especially them?" Boyle's Tadashi presents himself as a young, idealistic Wright acolyte who displays some of the Master's arrogance and style, but who, in his apprentice role, also feels the pain of the high-handedness with which Frank and Olgivanna run their household. The older Tadashi, looking back years after Wright's death, mixes admiration with knowing cynicism about the man. The author also elects to tell his story in reverse. The scandals and humiliations of Wright and his third wife, Olgivanna, open the novel. Wife number two, Miriam, controls the middle part of the book as she hurls invective and threats at Wright, fighting her own volatile, unstable character as well as Frank's preemptive self-indulgence and hardness. Mamah, the client's wife for whom Wright left first wife Katherine and built Taliesin, finishes the book, mainly because hers is the most cataclysmic, the most shattering, of THE WOMEN's stories. Mamah, with whom Wright shared a life of ideas, suffered when the reality of Taliesin life intruded on her dream of how it could have been with Frank. Miriam, a noted sculptress, also discovered that the unchecked needs of Frank, the Great Architect, left her empty and overshadowed. Only Olgivanna, the young unshaped girl when she met Frank, apparently learned to fit into the crevices around Frank's imposing bulk and, after their early travails, fashioned herself a commanding pedestal. For Katherine, who, perhaps due to book length concerns, gets no section of her own despite nearly twenty years and six children with Frank, one passage in THE WOMEN speaks perhaps most eloquently, though prematurely, for her: "She heard him call after her, but she didn't turn. And when she got to the motorcar -- the chromatic advertisement of self and self-love, because that was the only kind of love Frank was capable of, and she knew that now, would always know it -- she kept going." Yes. But not until she had waited years to see if he would come back to her. THE WOMEN is a vivid, avant-garde projection of what it might have been like during key episodes in the lives of these lovers of Frank Lloyd Wright,