T. C. Boyle has written many novels based on real-life figures, including The Inner Circle ( ), featuring Alfred Kinsey, and The Road to Wellville (1993), about Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. World’s End won the PEN/Faulkner Award and Drop City ( ) was a National Book Award finalist.
The Story: Was Frank Lloyd Wright a "wounded genius," or a "philanderer and sociopath who abused the trust of practically everyone he knew, especially the women?" Tadashi Sato, an apprentice architect at Taliesin, asks this question as he narrates Wright’s four major romances and unconventional life. The novel starts with the exotic Montenegrin Olgivanna Milanoff, Wright’s last wife. It then moves backward in time to his life with Southern belle and morphine addict Maud Miriam Noel; to the 1914 tragedy in Taliesin, where his lover and soul mate Mamah Cheney and her children were murdered; and finally, to Wright’s marriage to Kitty Tobin, his loyal first wife and the mother of six of his children. Against these changing relationships, Wright created his architectural masterpieces.
Viking. 451 pages. $27.95. ISBN: 0670020419
Christian Science Monitor
"Boyle’s style, alternately ornate and driven, is perfectly suited to his subject, a man whose self-absorption sucked up everyone in his path, whether they were objects of desire or marks to be fleeced. … The intersection of Wright’s public and private lives is Boyle’s interest." Carlo Wolff
NY Times Book Review
"Boyle doesn’t pay much attention to the concentrated effort that Wright put into his work. It may be that in pursuing Wright’s emotional life, Boyle scants his intellect and artistic genius. But that seems deliberate: love, not architecture, is the focus here." Joanna Scott
San Francisco Chronicle
"If Mamah is the book’s heroine, Miriam is its heavy. … The author handles the big themes—Wright the genius battling an uncomprehending, philistine world and Wright the man loving and loathing his women—with extraordinary brio." Dan Cryer
Wall Street Journal
"Despite dozens of writers’ attempts to capture Wright’s story, it seems safe to say that none has rendered it with more crackling life than Mr. Boyle." Penelope Rowlands
Washington Post
"The Women is an altogether manic, occasionally baffling and yet strangely riveting novel. True readers of the genre, be warned: It’s a romance only in spirit. Call it a thinking man’s soap opera." Marie Arana
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Though at times amusing, this postmodern ploy [of the biased biographer] has grown stale. … For all their differences, Wright’s women … barely exist outside the gravitational force field of the great man." Glenn C. Altschuler
New York Times
"Having decided to take on this Wagnerian-size life, Mr. Boyle has responded not with the deflating humor and hyperventilated energy of his early work or the emotional insight of his more recent novels but instead with a small, cheesy paint-by-numbers soap opera that manages to be pallid and gratuitously garish at the same time." Michiko Kakutani
Critical Summary
T. C. Boyle has written many biographical novels, but critics weren’t sure that this effort fully succeeds. All agreed that Boyle is a graceful stylist whose writing, noted the Washington Post, "will reward you in the last scene of this altogether predictable and (sometimes deliciously) overwrought novel." While mostly adhering to the facts, melodramatic it is. That didn’t seem to be the major problem, though. Many reviewers thought that the fictional narrator Tadashi Sato, writing a biography of his mentor with limited knowledge, was a curious, unnecessary device. Critics also faulted Boyle’s decision to tell the story backward. Finally, those perhaps hoping for a different book complained that Boyle fails to explore Wright’s intellectual genius. But "love, not architecture, is the focus here," noted the New York Times Book Review—which readers should know going in.
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Loving Frank | Nancy Horan (2007): When Mamah Borthwick Cheney’s husband commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design the couple’s home in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1903, Mamah and Frank began a scandalous, clandestine affair that rocked American society. But their romance, begun so idealistically, ended in tragedy. ( )