The Women

Overview

A dazzling novel of Frank Lloyd Wright, told from the point of view of the women in his life

Having brought to life eccentric cereal king John Harvey Kellogg in The Road to Wellville and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in The Inner Circle, T.C. Boyle now turns his fictional sights on an even more colorful and outlandish character: Frank Lloyd Wright. Boyle's account of Wright's life, as told through the experiences of the four women who loved him, blazes with his trademark wit and invention. Wright's life was one long howling struggle against the bonds of convention, whether aesthetic, social, moral, or romantic. He never did what was expected and despite the overblown scandals surrounding his amours and very public divorces and the financial disarray that dogged him throughout his career, he never let anything get in the way of his larger-than-life appetites and visions. Wright's triumphs and defeats were always tied to the women he loved: the Montenegrin beauty Olgivanna Milanoff; the passionate Southern belle Maud Miriam Noel; the spirited Mamah Cheney, tragically killed; and his young first wife, Kitty Tobin. In The Women, T.C. Boyle's protean voice captures these very different women and, in doing so, creates a masterful ode to the creative life in all its complexity and grandeur.

Editorial Reviews

The genius of Frank Lloyd Wright was both magnetic and cruel, as evidenced by the succession of failed marriages and hot-blooded affairs depicted in this biographic reimagining that drills into Wright mythology and the dark shadows of the American dream. The narrative moves backwards in time through the accounts of four women in Wright's life: Olgivanna, the steely, grounded dancer from Montenegro; Miriam, the drug-addled narcissist from the South; Kitty, the devoted first wife; and Mamah, the beloved and murdered soul mate and intellectual companion. But the novel's centerpiece is Taliesin, Wright's Oz-like Wisconsin home. The tragedies that befall Taliesin-fires, brutality-serve as proxy for Wright's inner turmoil; his deeper stirrings surface only occasionally from behind Boyle's oft-overbearing depiction of Wright's women. The most engaging person is Tadashi Sato, the Japanese-American apprentice and narrator who emerges via his frequent footnotes as a complex reflection of "Wrieto-san" and, with his inability to remain objective and his evolving view of Wright and Wright's image, becomes the book's most dynamic character. It's a lush, dense and hyperliterate book-in other words, vintage Boyle. (Feb.)

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Author Information

Bio of T. C. Boyle

Born in Peekskill, New York, Coraghessan Boyle originally chose to pursue a career in music. While pursuing his studies, however, he encountered the absurdist, antiheroic works of writers such as Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth. As a result, Boyle decided to pursue a literary career. Admired for his energetic language, his daring, and his invention, Boyle is considered by many critics to be among the great American humorists writing today. Crafting his novels and stories with a lexicon that has reminded readers of S. J. Perelman, Boyle tends to create bizarre situations out of the mundane. In "The Hector Quesadilla Story," published in Greasy Lake and Other Stories (1985), Boyle depicts an aging baseball player in a never-ending game; another tale, "Ike and Nina," relates an imaginary love affair between President Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev's wife. Like other postmodernists, Boyle mixes history with fantasy, high with low culture, to create a sometimes surrealistic stew. Early criticism of his work faulted Boyle for what some perceived as a superficial quality; more recent novels, however, such as World's End and East Is East reveal Boyle's development as a writer of rich, complex, hilarious worlds. 020

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Additional Info

Imprint

Viking Adult

Filesize

1.55 MB

Number of Pages

464

eBook ISBN

9781440686191