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, each of whom was, for a time, as paramount as any women could be to him. It is beautifully written (a thesaurus at hand would not be amiss), devoting considerable prose to descriptions of the surroundings, the weather, clothes, and other stage-setting details. Its memorable scenes succeed in limning believable, poignant, but not particularly sympathetic versions of these flawed people.
Katherine, Mamah, Miriam, Olgivanna, and Frank are each etched with Tadashi's sometimes catty bias on top of being hobbled by their historical selves, rendering them in a stark light. Certainly the book's horrific conclusion elicits shock and sorrow for the preyed upon and their kin. But even there, the direct victims seem to fade, and it is really egocentric Frank who's the focus as one of the novel's core women thinks on the last page, "The poor man....The poor, poor man."
One way to view THE WOMEN is as an exercise in portraying futility: the "great" Frank Lloyd Wright makes the same "mistakes" repeatedly, and the women who love him pay heavy prices. Perhaps without all the emotional roiling and spectacle, Wright could not have produced the impressive buildings he did. Whether the passionate unions he formed were worth -- especially for the women --the prize of his architecture is the question. Being Wright's love and having all the world know it -- despite efforts to keep a low profile -- rained down fire (literally) and tribulation until "everything shrieked and groaned."
To compare artistic visions of Wright's life, the recently published
Loving Frank: A Novel, by Nancy Horan, delves into the Mamah era. Autobiographical memoirs from the years of the last Wright marriage include
Reflections From the Shining Brow: My years with Frank Lloyd Wright and Olgivanna Lazovich Wright, by Kamal Amin and
Years with Frank Lloyd Wright: Apprentice to Genius by Edgar Tafel. For an overview of Wright's "troubled life" and "his long career as a master builder" try
Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life (Penguin Lives), by Ada Louise Huxtable. But first, dive into Boyle's ambitious THE WOMEN. 4.5 stars.
