The Wright women

Boyle crafts vivid novel about architect's stormy ties to wives and lover

By Jenny Shank, Special to the Rocky

Published February 12, 2009 at 7 p.m.

Text size

More Books

When I interviewed T.C. Boyle in 2007, he was at work on The Women, the life of Frank Lloyd Wright from the perspectives of four women in his life. Inspired by the Wright-designed prairie- style house that he lives in, the author said the architect fit in well with other historical characters he's written about, including Alfred Kinsey in The Inner Circle and John Kellogg of The Road to Wellville.

"I call them the great egomaniacs of the 20th century," he said.

But in Boyle's engaging new novel, Wright's second wife, Maude Miriam Noel, is just as big an egomaniac as he is. That fact makes for an entertaining read as these explosive personalities collide.

Wright, who died in 1959 at the age of 91, lived a dramatic life, full of love affairs, scandals, tragedy, globe-trotting and wild professional success coupled with perpetual near-bankruptcy. Boyle focuses on Wright's four great loves: Kitty, whom Wright married when he was 21 and from whom he quickly grew apart; his mistress Mamah Cheney, for whom he built his Wisconsin estate, Taliesin, and who died there in a tragic fire; his second wife, Miriam, a histrionic Southern belle; and Olga Ivanovna, "Olgivanna," a Montenegrin dancer who grew into a formidable household manager.

(Readers may be familiar with Mamah Cheney from Nancy Horan's moving, vivid portrait of her in the 2007 novel Loving Frank, but Horan left plenty of stories for Boyle to tell from Wright's jam-packed life.)

Boyle tells his tale as though it were written by one of Wright's former apprentices, a Japanese man named Tadashi Sato, who came to America on a student visa before World War II. Tadashi reflects on his days as an apprentice in the chapters that introduce each section, and his voice appears throughout the book in the form of amusing and instructive footnotes, adding another layer of perspective on the great architect.

Tadashi tells the tale backward, beginning with Olgivanna, Wright's final wife, the only one of the women whom Tadashi knew.

Olgivanna, an immigrant, is in her 20s with a "balletic grace all her own" when she meets Wright. For the early part of the book, she's the victim of Wright's second wife Miriam's relentless, crazed attacks, which range from an unwelcome visit in the hospital after Olgivanna gives birth to her and Wright's daughter to dramatic performances for the press, attempts to storm Taliesin's gates, criminal charges she files against them and an assault on their home with an ax.

Eventually Olgivanna develops into the tough, efficient manager, known among the apprentice architects as "the dragon lady," who ballasted Frank during his final decades.

But it's Miriam who dominates the tale, and Boyle has great fun with her, much to the reader's delight. A vain, grandiose Francophile by way of Tennessee, Miriam first made contact with Wright through a sympathy letter she sent after his mistress Mamah Cheney's death. The scene in which Miriam meets Wright is a Boyle tour de force, demonstrating the magnetism this physically lovely woman had over the architect even though she was fairly volatile right from the beginning.

" 'It's a great pleasure,' (Wright) began, and then faltered, the customary rituals of greeting failing him because they were inadequate, hopeless, a falsification of everything he was feeling in that moment. She could see it instantly, see her power reflected in his eyes, hunger there, confusion, a gaze of pure astonishment running up and down her body like the touch of his two hands, and something else, too, something deeper, primal, naked in its immediacy and need."

Miriam later emerges as the vengeful, morphine-addicted, pampered wife who will not grant Wright the divorce he seeks on grounds of desertion. As much as Miriam wanted to rule Taliesin, she couldn't stand living in the Midwest among judging neighbors and decamped to California to enjoy sunshine and quick access to drugs in Mexican pharmacies.

After Miriam leaves the stage, a little bit of air goes out of The Women. The last section is a tragic one, with Frank deserting Kitty, his first wife and the mother of six of his children, and taking off with Mamah, who leaves behind her two children. Momentum builds toward Mamah's notorious end and the destruction of Taliesin. Although Boyle's take on these events is as finely written as the rest of The Women, Horan's novel created a fuller portrait of this time, in part because she focused only on Mamah.

At times, the reverse chronology of the novel removes suspense, as the reader discovers how each of Wright's love affairs ends before he learns about their beginnings, but Boyle's vivid language and characterizations prove propulsive enough.

Boyle's point in reversing the chronology becomes clear by the end - certain patterns repeated so regularly in Wright's life that the timeline of it begins to seem as circular as his Guggenheim Museum building in Manhattan.

Ultimately, though, the author excels in portraying the larger tapestry of the incredible life of Frank Lloyd Wright, a man with such grandiosity, artistic drive and peculiarity of habits that Boyle would have invented him if he hadn't already existed.

Jenny Shank's fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review and other journals. She writes about books for NewWest.net and lives in Boulder.

The Women

* By T.C. Boyle. Viking, 464 pages, $27.95

* Grade: A

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News