The Women by T. C. Boyle - a book about Frank Lloyd Wright

The Women by T.C. Boyle - The writer T.C. Boyle fell under Frank Lloyd Wright's spell sixteen years ago.  That's when Boyle and his family moved into the first home architect Wright constructed in California, and the only one in his famous prairie style.  He began to look into Frank Lloyd Wright’s personal life and this book is a result of he found.  Wright's personal life reads like a soap opera.  There were numerous wives and mistresses - including one who was murdered at Taliesen, Wright's Wisconsin estate. In short, Wright's life is the stuff novels are made of.  Boyle called his "The Women".  It was published earlier this year.

Partially from the inside jacket:  This is T.C. Boyle’s account of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life, as told through the tempestuous experiences of the four women who loved him blazes with the author’s 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 final disarray that dogged him through 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 Olgivanna Milanoff, an exotic imperious Montenegrin beauty who was a student of the Russian mystic Gurdjieff and was know by Wright’s apprentices as “the Dragon Lady”; Maude Miriam Noel, a passionate southern belle with a mean temper and a fondness for morphine; the spirited Mamah Borthwick Cheney, tragically murdered at Wright’s Wisconsin estate, Taliesin in 1914; and his young first wife, Kitty Tobin, with whom he had 6 children. 

Book review from the New Yorker:  Boyle’s latest novel takes on the architect Frank Lloyd Wright by examining his notoriously tumultuous relationships with four women, each unique in her own histrionic way.  Narrated in reverse chronological order by a fictional Japanese apprentice, the book is extremely readable and deftly builds a portrait of the artist as pure egoist. Unfortunately, the novel avoids any sustained consideration of Wright’s relationship to his art; a passion arguably more important in forming his genius than any of the women in his life were.  Still, it proves an effective showcase for Boyle's own strengths as a craftsman. His prose is full of vivid descriptions and turns of phrase that pop with a preternatural precision.

The Women by T.C. Boyle

ISBN 0670020419

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