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Product Description
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.
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Customer Reviews: - Not your "Average Man"
T. C. Boyle is possibly my favorite writer. He scratches away the layers of cultural expectations and gives us real characters with all their excentricities laid bare. Yes, the structure of The Women is backwards, but Boyle had to preserve the dramatic moment for last. Especially for those who know little or nothing about Frank Lloyd Wright. Without this the story could be repetitious and dull. Wright and his women did afterall repeat the same themes over and over.
I particularly enjoyed two things in work. First, the mores of the early 1900s. We forget just how shocking and scandalous divorce and living together in sin was considered. We forget how straight laced rural America was in those days. And second, the notion (of Wright and his women) that they are somehow above the moral grounds of the "average man." Their genius sets them apart and they need not conform.
This last notion is relevant for us today because it is exactly what Wall Street, the banks, and the Madoffs are telling us--or they were. ...more info - You will never look at Frank Lloyd Wright 's work with the same View Again!
If you liked Loving Frank then you will love The Women. T. C. Boyle, the best selling author of World's End tells the story of Frank Lloyd Wright and all of the women who loved him in a fascinating story of fiction. You will never look at any of the architectural works the same after reading The Women....more info - Delicious!
Boyle has been one of my favorite novelists for the last dozen years or so. His style is absolutely perfect for this send-up of the professional egoist, Frank Lloyd Wright and the four women in his life. Boyle leaves it unresolved as to whether Wright (quite apart from his first, and evidently sane wife) attracted nut cases, or if loving Wright turned women into nut cases.
The narrative does run backward, from his third wife's struggle with the second he has yet to divorce, to the first wife's abandonment for the lover killed by an axe murderer. This approach does deftly conceal the recurrent, patterned mistakes made by this sad, sad man. The NY Times gave this book a snarky review. I think it a masterful triumph....more info - Engrossing!
I read this book after reading "Loving Frank" which I also highly recommend. "Loving Frank" was primarily about one of Wright's women so I would read that book first (without reading any of the reviews to give away the story).
For me this was the type of book that I didn't want to end because I enjoyed it so much.
Don't be misled by the rating as most of the beginning reviewers who rated it so lowly were kindle owners that were angry about it being priced over $9.99 at release. What they don't know is if you wait just a week or two, it comes down to $9.99 which is when you buy it!...more info - Boring, Disjointed And Derogatory
Why is the whole story told through a Japanese apprentice's view of characters? He had only met Olgivanna who he describes "as a sour thin woman, tubercular in that first year". The whole tone of the narrator does not understand Wright's need for women, indeed why would women be important in any way.
Each woman is in the most negative and manipulative light to the point of boredom. Frank does not fare much better. This book just plays up the most unflattering(and obvious) sides of these characters so it reads like a nasty person's gossip. There is no humor to temper the narrative and it is a chore to read. Nancy Horan's Loving Frank is an infinitely better picture of Mamah and her story.
...more info - Fascinating Insights into Wright's personality, joie de vivre and women
TC Boyle is a very able writer and attacks Wright's relationship with his women with zest. Boyle has insights into FLLW's megalomania and maybe the author gained some of the needed perspective because Boyle lives in one of Wright's creations.
Boyle knows how to structure story telling in a way that adds dimensions to a tale that is already as inviting as a FLLW entry way. His choice of the voice of the teller of the tale and the reordering of the parade of events makes this book even more fascinating.
Each of FLLW's women are so different and Boyle delves into these ladies, their personalities and why the master got so involved with each.
If you have a chance to see Boyle at an author's evening, GO. He is a great speaker and his reading of his own words is well worth the price of admission.
...more info - TC Boyle--what happened to you?
I liked this writer's earlier works--THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE is a fond favorite as is TORTILLA CURTAIN, but I honestly feel that Boyle is like many writers who write too many books. Seriously. It's as if they have a disease. They just know when to stop. And there are many. I think of John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, the late John Updike, the dreadful Ian McEwan. These guys and gals need to get out in the world and do volunteer work or something to get out of their heads. And here TC Boyle seems like he's joining the ranks with those who can't stop writing.
To me, a good writer-- no, a great writer-- simply knows when to call it quits.
This guy just keeps goin and goin. (Like that stupid Energizer bunny..)
And what happens is--the book sags under the weight of just plain bad sentences.
And what's with the narrator here? I think it's a strange choice. And the purple prose? What's going on here?
Frank Lloyd Wright is a fascinating figure--but I didn't get a sense that Boyle was revealing anything new or revealing about this man, or really, these women. LOVING FRANK seems to accomplish this goal. At least better than what I got here.
...more info - Women, Women and More Women
The most successful aspect of this novel is its point of view-- it is told through the eyes of Frank Lloyd Wright's sole Japanese apprentice. The book is amusingly footnoted, too, giving it a pseudo-scholarly air. Yet the novel, which purports to shed light on Wright's four main loves, is also a failure in that either the Japanese narrator or Boyle himself cannot clearly see the women. Three of the four women share certain character traits, such as a tendency to carp at Wright. The one woman who stands above the rest is the doomed Mamah. Somehow the others, although greatly wronged, come across as harpies.
For my money Nancy Horan's "Loving Frank," which is about Wright's affair with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, is a novel with more heart....more info - Well written book
I had wanted to read this book since finishing Loving Frank. That book had me asking more questions than it gave me answers so I thought this would help. It did, and again had me asking questions.
I found the book very well written, and was not bothered by the backwards structure at all (but then I like books that are narrated outside of the box, Cloud Atlas being one of my favorite books). What I found interesting was when we finally learn about Maymah, we realize that we know her better because we know what happens afterwards, and we realize how they all have connections to each other, similarities that show the types of women FLW was attracted to
I didn't care for the Japanese narrator and felt at times his footnotes were out of place. But this book is about women's role in society, and so the narrator is showing his role, and ultimately the role of the blacks involved in the story. So I guess it fits, but I think the novel could have been just as good without that particular narrator.
I did want to know more about Olga and Kitty. While Miriam was a larger than life person , and certainly was the connection from the beginning to the end between the wives, she grated on my nerves from the beginning. She was more a caricature than a person, where the other two seemed to have real complexity and dimension.
I certainly got a better sense as to why these women were attracted, why Mamah would leave her children and family (I question I had in Loving Frank). He was one of those magnetic personalities, and he was a way of escaping from a drab world to a world of riches. In one of the footnotes, it mentions that Kitty actually stood by him in the press, not once but twice, long after their marriage was over. That says something I suppose.
The book is also about the 'free love' movement. Its sprouted by each wife (well, not Kitty of course), along with 'we don't care what anyone thinks'. Interesting then that they complained about the press (just as gossip hungry then as they are now) and how horrible they were treated by journalists.
This book is very well written, and is rather a quick read. Its the only book I've read by him, and now I feel as if I should read more. Any recommendations for his best one of the bunch?...more info - The Women and the Architect: The stormy love life of Frank Lloyd Wright as interpreted by T.C. Boyle
T.C. Boyle received his PH.D in the field of Victorian Literature. It shows in the many prose works he has produced over a long career as a novelist. This latest book "The Women" deals with the amorous doings of Frank Lloyd Wright (1873-1959) Wisconsin born architectural genius and his four marriages. The dialogue is invented by Boyle as are several characters including the Japanese narrator of the fiction. The fictional Sato introduces each of the wives to the reader moving from Wright's last wife to his first in a reverse chronological order. Sato is a bright intellectual who suffers from racism in America and engages in a tragic love affair with another Wright apprentice Daisy (shades of the lost Daisy in Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby").
The four wives are:
1. Katy who had six children with Wright and was his first wife. They lived together in upper middle class Oak Park near Chicago. Her character
is only lightly sketched by Boyle. She was the least interesting of the quartet who wed Wright.
2. Mamah was guilty of adultery with Wright. She left her husband and children to wed him. Wright often faced charges under the Mann Act and was known as a notorious womanizer. Mamah and six other people were brutally murdered by an insane worker at Taliesin (the Wright estate in Wisconsin. She was the most intellectual of his women.
3. Miriam from Memphis was a middle age lady who was married and eager to bed and wed Wright. He dumped her for wife four. Miriam was a morphine addict who was a narcissistic hedonistic dame. She was a tiger who sought to defange Wright of his foibles. Instead she struck out and was dismissed from the Master's presence.
4. Olga from Montenegro was much younger than Wright. She had a child prior to her marriage to him. Olga was a stern woman who ran Taliesin with tough love. She adored Wright.
Frank Lloyd Wright was a great architect but a lousy husband and father. He comes across as egotistical, demanding, vain and sex crazed.
Boyle's style is peppered with words for you to look up in the dictionary; discreet sex scenes and rich poetic descriptions of the locales in this novel from Wisconsin, to Chicago, to Mexico and in Europe.
This is a fine novel which will be enjoyed by the general reading audience and those who love to study Wright's biography.
...more info - When is a book review not a book review?
When is a book review not a book review? When it's a Kindle review.
I'm a huge Boyle fan and was eagerly anticipating this latest book from him. Even though much is revealed about Frank Lloyd Wright (an artist in the truest sense with little regard for practical matters, his disregard for early 20th century mores, shocking), this book is about the women in Wright's life. Their characters, why they are attracted to Wright and vice-versa, how they respond to living under public scruntiny once attached to Wright.
The Women is very well written, the non-linear story telling adds complexity, but makes the dramatic arc of the story more interesting. The use of Tadashi, a Wright apprentice, as the narrator doesn't entirely work for me...is he a main character or a detached observer? But the book works as a great story with great writing. Not quite a 5 star book, but I gave it 5 to compensate for some of the lower rating the book received.
Which brings me back to my first point. I came to Amazon to see how the book was reviewed after having read it. I expected 4+ stars as a topline rating, knowing Boyle fans were likely to get their reviews in early. 3 stars is surprisingly low for this book. But virtually all the negative reviews are about the "high price" of the Kindle version of this book. IMO, customers should write reviews that discuss the literary merits of a book, and Amazon, per their "review guidelines" should not post reviews that are just about the Kindle price...unless they want to post them with the Kindle product.
It's a shame that readers who might otherwise investigate and buy will dismiss this book for it's relatively low topline score. Potential readers and readers and reviewers should keep this in mind....more info - Over-wrought and over-written
Any woman who wrote ridiculous lines such as:
"And he, fully aroused, his face gone rubicund and his ears glistening like Christmas ornaments in the quavering light, breathed his answer against the soft heat of her lips."
would be laughed out of writing. But because it's written by a man, this over-blown, over-written novel gets five stars from most reviewers. Sorry, guys. Not from me.
The narrator, Tadashi Sato, was a totally inexplicable choice who severely detracted from the story. Whatsit-san this and Whatsit-san that. Oh, please. There were several times I felt like throwing the novel in the fireplace. And it was a narrator who gave, as far as I was concerned, little insight into FLW and no insight into what the heck it was all these women saw in him. He was a genius... That doesn't make someone attractive to women necessarily. By the end of the novel, I personally found his his narcissistic destructiveness a lot less than charming. I mean virtually the second Borthwick Cheney was slaughtered he was in bed with another woman. Charming. But if we had been inside FLW instead of at a distance, maybe I would have seen some grief or something other than total selfishness.
Now you can't blame Boyle for FLW's selfishness, but I think you can blame him for not getting deeper into the man's character. Surely there was SOMETHING else there. Or he could have pretended since this was, after all, a novel.
Ok, now let's get to Boyle's much vaunted prose. I will be blunt. I simply don't like it. I find it purple and over-wrought. Lines like: "Outside, beyond the gray frame of the window, the weather was dreary, funereal clouds strung from the rooftops like laundry hung out to dry, and so cold even the dirty gray ratlike pigeons were huddled against it, dark motionless lines of frozen feathers and arrested beaks blighting the eaves as far as she could see down both sides of the block." make me wonder if the man ever met an adjective he didn't like. Arrested beaks blighting the eaves? Come on. That doesn't even MEAN anything. Rather than artistic, it strikes me as just plain purple.
Now, I'm sure I'll be flamed by all of the Boyle fans out there. There are worse novels that have been written by far. FLW's life was interesting, no doubt. But if you want a novel about FLW, I have to suggest Loving Frank as a better choice.
...more info - Taker
T.C. Boyle's novel about the wives and mistresses of Frank Lloyd Wright titled, The Women, leaves readers with one clear impression: Mr. Wright got what he wanted. Boyle writes the novel from the later to the earlier periods of Wright's life. He begins with the wife who survived Wright, Olgivanna. He goes on to Miriam, whose drug addiction and narcissism gave Wright heaps of trouble. Mamah is next, Wright's soulmate, who is murdered at Taliesin. Then there is Kitty, Wright's devoted first wife and the mother of his children. Boyle uses as the narrator a student and apprentice at Taliesin, and it is that place that becomes the central core of the novel. As with other Boyle novels, his insights into characters is strong, the use of language precise and finely written (although I only learned two or three new words from this offering,) and the setting described with a precision and clarity that places come alive. The fact that Boyle lives in a house in California that Wright designed gave him an extra level of involvement that helped him explore the personality of this larger-than-life character who packed a lot of complicated living into his twentieth century life.
Rating: Three-star (Recommended)
...more info - Great book - don't miss the footnotes
Let me start off by saying that I am a big fan of T. C. Boyle, and this book did not disappoint.
Brief, brief summary, no spoilers:
The title "The Women" refers to the 3 main lovers/wives of famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. The story of each woman is prefaced by an "introduction" by one of Lloyd's apprentices, a Japanese man named Tadashi Sato. (Wright's first wife is discussed, but she doesn't get a separate introduction.)
In his narration, Tadashi tells of his arrival at Taliesin, Wright's magnificent home in Wisconsin. Whereas his tale goes in chronological order, the story of the women does not.
And that's one of the things that made this novel so memorable for me - we see characters at different points in time, through their own eyes, and through those of others. This also helped make the foreshadowing and sense of menace so palpable. When I finished that last page, I felt like I had been through an experience - and I had that wonderful reader "high" that comes with finishing a wonderful, thought-provoking book.
I do have a couple of quibbles - I am not sure how I felt about the narration by Tadashi. I think the book might have been better without it. It felt a little disruptive - as if it were from a different story, both in mood and in content.
Also, I thought one of the characters, Miriam, was almost cartoonish in her portrayal as a villain. She definitely helped give the book some of its best moments, but she never felt real to me because she consistently acted the same way, and always against her best interest. Mind you, I know there are people that do that, but she never sprung to life for me, and I could never see anyone being friends with her, lest marrying her.
All in all though, this was just a terrific read. I recommend reading it with Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan. I think that The Women is the better book, but the experience of reading one right on the heels of the other is very rewarding and fulfilling.
Recommended, especially for book clubs.
*** Note, I read this on a Kindle, and missed the footnotes when Tadashi was narrating. Be sure to read them because they add to the enjoyment of the book. (And as to how to easily access the Kindle footnotes, just check out the first comment to this post.)...more info - engaging biographical fiction
Frank Lloyd Wright lived a life of triumph and defeat all in the public eye. Whether he designed a remarkable edifice like his Wisconsin home Taliesin or an affair he seemed bigger than life. Four women loved him though surely there were others: Montenegro dancer Olgivanna, Miriam the drug addicted Southern belle, Kitty the first wife; and Mamah the intellectual equal who was murdered.
Told mostly by Wright's apprentice Japanese-American Tadashi Sato, this is an engaging biographical fiction. The story line looks at the great twentieth century architect through the musings of four females who loved him as each looks back at their relationship with him. Ironically, the show is stolen from the star and the titled characters by the narrator. Tadashi as the sole survivor is the only one whose opinion of Wright changes and whose wry thoughtful commentary throughout the novel add much of the complexity of trying to describe this multifaceted person; how complicated is symbolized by the remarkable Taliesin where much tragedy occurred.
Harriet Klausner
...more info - Down in the Dirt, and Larger than Life
Though a T.C. Boyle fan, I had intended to skip The Women: A Novel. A novel about an architect, and about his women? Life is too short, I thought. Nagged by several friends that are dedicated readers to give The Women a second thought, I picked it up and read a chapter. Big mistake: putting it back down was MUCH worse than trying to eat only one potato chip.
The premise of this fictionalized biography is simple: explore the drama filled life of Frank Lloyd Wright and the four women that he spent significant time with over the course of nine-tenths of a century. Frank Lloyd Wright's life has long been the source of legends. Why should you, or your book club, consider The Women anything more than yet another version of a tale told a thousand times? Because, simply stated, T.C. Boyle wrote it. Boyle is one of America's premier writers, and this book has him in full literary stride.
T.C. Boyle doesn't have a forte. He has a portfolio of fortes. He is not unique amongst excellent American writers in being capable of doing searing commentary on life in America; John Irving and Barbara Kingsolver come to mind. Boyle does appear to be unique, however, in maintaining the clarity of his vision, avoiding the cataracts such as preachiness (Kingsolver) and preoccupation with sex (Irving, others) that often seem to obscure the writer's eye as time goes by. Boyle's wordsmithing has only improved as time has worn down some rough edges. His writing is not free of mockery, but is inoculated against pomposity and absent of piety. I'm suspicious that he has affection for the human race, which James Taylor (also guilty of affection) once called "this f---ed up family". These qualities give him power when he tells a complex story.
The Women IS a complex story. You'll learn about architecture, passion, racism, narcissism, Japan, homicidal rage, drug addiction, hubris, feminism, all liberally dosed with T.C. Boyle's tasty blend of irony. Boyle's device of turning the tale on its chronological head (the last shall come first, the first shall come last) is effective: people that initially revolt you will be given at least small allotments of grace by the time you finish reading.
The Women: A Novel, is a saga. If you don't know much about Frank Lloyd Wright, or the women that he lived with, DON'T do research before you read the book: you'll miss a boatload of "Holy Cow!" moments if you are pre-informed. The book isn't a short one, it's my guess that you'll close the back cover of the book with a long exhalation, and a bit of what has been called the thousand yard stare. The story will linger in your mind long after you put the book back on a shelf.
...more info - 3 stars even though I love Boyle.
T.C. Boyle suffers from an excess of talent, so much so that sometimes I think he doesn't know what to do with himself. When it came to this project, I'm sure he thought, 'FLW, compelling ego, crazy life, bagged loads of babes, sounds great, I'll tear it up.' After all, Boyle has given us some fascinating portraits of wild and crazy people before. 'Road to Wellville'? 'Riven Rock'?
But something didn't quite pan out. This is, of course, a well-written book, that goes without saying. We all know Boyle has some secret well of words that he draws from, some of which his audience has never read before and won't ever read again except in his work. But the overall work didn't quite jell completely for me. Possibly it was the curious structure of how he told the stories of the 3 women; possibly it was the back-and-forth between the novelization of the stories and the faux-realism of the 'apprentice' telling the stories; I'm not sure. Fundamentally, though, my life wasn't changed by reading this book, and I think I kind of expected it to be....more info - Excellent writing; strange subject choice
T.C. Boyle is one of the country's best male writers. I truly enjoyed "The Tortilla Curtain," "Drop City" and "Talk, Talk." I don't understand why Boyle took the time to work his way through the story of Frank Lloyd Wright and his women. It felt like drudgery to read. The plot worked backwards, which meant that even readers who didn't know anything about Wright's life and loves, would know the outcome long before the end. Why did he choose this format? Why did he tell the story through the Japanese narrator? Who knows?
One of the women, Miriam, was unbearable to spend time with for this reader. I almost quit reading halfway through just to get away from her.
Footnote: I am not interested in reading peoples' complaints about Kindle pricing in supposed book reviews. Please, keep it to yourself....more info - THE WOMEN
After reading, LOVING FRANK, I was in a F.L.Wright state of mind. I couldn't put this book down, reading both books, back to back was not too much Frank. I recommend it....more info - The Women
[[
ASIN:0670020419 The Women: A Novel]] The book is long and fast reading. It is a story about Frank Lloyd Wright's wives and lovers. I enjoyed it but found it a bit confusing because the author starts out telling the story of two of his women then a tale about his second wife and then ends with his first wife and second lover. I felt the book was written sort of backwards. I found out later there is another book about him called FRANK which I probably should have read first! Also, there are many many words I have never heard of or know the meaning of throughout the story....more info
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