After reading TC Boyle's "Tortilla Curtain" and loving it so much that it is on my top 10 all-time favorite list, I expected to thoroughly enjoy "The Women." However, I did not. In fact, I ended up reading it in two stages, months apart. Although Boyle writes with such insight, the technique in which he tells the story of Frank Lloyd Wright and his "women" put me off. The story is told from the perspective of one of his apprentices, Tadashi Sato, and is shared chronologically backwards. As I read, I wished that instead of each 'woman's' story being told in the third person, it was relayed first hand by them as the first person. The reader does get the gist of how repetitive the loves of Wright were, and how all of them excused his treatment of them on behalf of genius. He was a larger than life figure and I did appreciate that fact. After reading "Loving Frank" last year and enjoying Nancy Horan's depiction of Wright's life with his mistress Mamah, it might have also tainted my view of Boyle's book. However, I did learn an interesting fact: Wright's second son Lloyd was the creator and founder of Lincoln Logs. ( )

T.C. Boyle’s new novel, The Women, is a fictionalized account of the adult years of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Writing in first person, Boyle chose as his narrator Tadashi Sato, a Japanese apprentice to Wright. The narrative revolves around the women in the architect’s life: his three wives and his mistress, Mamah Cheney. Although Tadashi Sato professes a great deal of admiration for his mentor throughout the book, ultimately Wright is not painted in a flattering light. His genius is acknowledged, but he comes across as an egotistical scoundrel. He is completely unscrupulous about money and his business dealings. Wright also justifies his scandalous treatment of women by his disregard for convention and his belief in the power of love. Yet when young Tadashi falls in love with a Caucasion apprentice working at his estate, Wright intervenes and puts an end to the relationship. Clearly the right to defy convention does not apply to everyone. Aside from Wright’s first wife, Kitty, I found all of the women to be equally self centered and unsympathetic.

The organization of the book was interesting. Boyle begins the novel with Wright’s third wife, and each section of the story goes backward in time to the previous woman in Wright’s life. This technique allows tension to build and enables the book to end dramatically with the murder of Mamah Cheney in 1914 and the destruction of their home, one of Wright’s architectural masterpieces. As can be expected of T.C. Boyle, the book was well written and engaging from beginning to end. ( )

The Women by TC Boyle the historical fiction account of the women in Frank LLyod Wright's life outside of his marriage with Catherine Wright.

Boyle's narrator tells the story in reverse chronological order which is a wise choice because the most sensational part of the story would take place in the beginning third of the novel and the latter two thirds would seem quite anti-climactic.

The downfall of the novel is the narrator who is a Japanese apprentice who lives at the Taliesen compound for a relatively short period of time. Because the narrator was not with Wright over the course of the novel, his information then comes from an Irish biographer grandson-in-law. The whole mechanism is very convoluted and does not give the reader the sense of an eye-witness account that I suspect was Boyle's intention.

In addition to the odd choice of narrator, a further distraction lies in the narrator's use of footnotes, which are his own personal asides. The are supposed to be informative and/or witty, but they are simply odd and off-putting. The ultimate effect is that the reader is frequently pulled back to reality and reminded that this is a fictional account of what happened which makes the story less gripping.

This is unfortunate because the material Boyle has been given is really rich. When the reader is not being thrust back into reality by Boyle's odd conventions the story is compelling and we learn not only about these three very different women, but through their eyes we get a glimpse of who Wright may have been in his private life.

How much credit should be given to Boyle for this story is not clear. The bare bones of this novel were gifted to him by the actions of real people, and while his ability to fill in the gaps that history has left creates a fluid and interesting novel, his prose lacks a lyrical quality and a certain depth. As readers we are given very little insight on how the lives and choices of these characters translate into the humanness that connects us all regardless of social and chronological differences.

Sometimes a novel is so enjoyable that one is able to overlook it's shortcomings, but that is not the case with The Women. While it would probably be enjoyable for those who already have an interest in Wright, it's faults cause it to miss its mark with the average reader. ( )

Having just returned from my time living in Chicago I was highly intrigued to read Boyle's novel about Frank Lloyd Wright and the women in his life. Despite the fact that it took me time to finish, it was a fascinating read and I was particularly captivated by Mamah Bothwick. Boyle did a great job of making it all interesting, whether or not it was true. ( )

Who were the women that were paired with that towering talent and ego, Frank Lloyd Wright? This novel attempts to delve into the question. Boyle, (who lives in a Wright house), works his way back in time, and paints a picture of a man who was faithful to his own libertine ideals and to his beloved Taliesen, but not to the humans that found themselves within his sphere of influence. ( )

Very interesting story of the relationships between Wright and 4 women in his life told from the women's perspective. A little slow in spots. ( )

Recommend ( )

This book is amazing--vivid, real. I forgot that I was reading a novel instead of the biography of Wright that the book purports to be. The structure, stories within stories, is ambitious and smart. It also sparked some interest in Wright's life, which appears to have been quite tumultuous. And no wonder he was able to accomplish so much--he had an entire staff taking care of him. ( )

THE WOMEN
I bought this book after it was brought to my notice by a review and also the author, T.C. Boyle, is one whose books I generally enjoy. From the review I knew that the work had some grounding in real events surrounding the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, an American architect. I did a little internet research from which I found that he was an architect of some renown but his private life also aroused a good deal of press interest verging on notoriety. For myself I found that this knowledge, and knowing the chronology, gave me a framework for enjoying the book. I can understand that some readers may prefer to come to the book with no knowledge or preconceptions. Although Frank - often referred to as Wrieto-San by the Japanese narrator - is an important character in many ways he is not the main protagonist. The role is taken by the four women who share his life. Hence the title. We learn almost nothing about his architecture although from time the buildings he is working on form a small background to the story. Much of the story is based in Taliesin, a house he built, and rebuilt, to his own design in Wisconsin. It is here that the horrifying events that fill the final pages of the book take place. A multiple murder and fire that leaves his mistress and her children dead and destroys much of the house. But the story is told in almost the reverse order. Early on we are introduced to Olgivanna who is in fact the fourth of his women. The story is told by Tadashi, a Japanese apprentice who lives in the house together with others learning their craft at the feet of their Master. They are also often unpaid and expected to chop wood, act as chauffeur and generally do all manner of tasks. That they are willing to stay can only be a tribute to their loyalty. They have little opportunity for a private life and when Tadashi and a new female apprentice have a relationship the girl is quickly dispatched back to her parents. This rankles a little as some of the story relates to the tensions between the lax or at least non-conforming morals of the various Wright households and the more conventional views of the local Wisconsin community. Money, or rather the lack of it, plays a part. Frank always seems to be in debt or borrowing money. Frank's first wife, Kitty (Catherine), plays a relatively small role in the story and sinks into the background when Frank takes a client's wife, Mamah, as mistress. Her rule over Taliesin comes to an end when she is slaughtered by a recently taken on negro servant. Miriam, in Paris at the time but a native of Tennessee, reads the story and writes to Frank. She is very much a feminist and is translating the works of her Swedish guru. She becomes his mistress and later his second wife. She is the character that makes the books what it is. She is addicted to morphine and I did not find her in any way likeable. Eventually Frank ousts her from Taliesin and her place is taken by Olgivanna. Unlike Catherine she does not accept her fate quietly and a good part of the early chapters tell of how she hounds him at Taliesin and tries legal manoeuvres to enforce her rights over the house. At the end of the book a note on the author mentions that he lives "in the George C Stewart house, the first of Frank Lloyd Wright's California designs".

In this novel, the author works on the daunting task of a creating a fiction based on actual people and events – specifically the life of Frank Lloyd Wright in regards to the significant women in his life. We don’t see much of his first wife, but we become very well acquainted with his first mistress (Mamah Borthwick Cheney) and his second and third wives (Maude Miriam Noel and Olgivanna Milanoff). All of the characters are well-developed and interesting in their own way. However, the way the story is told is a big downfall for this book. The narrative is framed as a true account by one of Wright’s former apprentices Tadashi Sato, loosely translated by Sato’s grandson-in-law, Seamus O’Flaherty. As the bulk of the book is presumably written by O’Flaherty, Tadashi likes to throw in his two cents with a footnote clarifying or expanding upon certain bits of information. However, with a footnote on nearly every page, it becomes annoying for the narrative to be interrupted so many times. Broken up into three parts (one for each of the women), Tadashi has a long introduction to each section of the book, in which he discusses events from when he was an apprentice to Wright. This makes for an odd chronology to begin with, further added to by the fact that the author chose to write backwards in time, beginning with Wright’s last wife and working his way back to his first affair. This renders many of the events in the book (especially the shocking end to Wright’s first affair) anticlimactic, as the reader has already had generous helpings of hints about these events. This also lends itself to gaps in the actual events, as certain sequences are skipped over because they do not fit into this fractured narrative (For instance, in the first section we find Wright and his second wife are already separated; at the end of the second section they are just getting married. The reason for the split is never clearly illuminated). I’m not sure what the author was trying to accomplish with this unconventional narrative (unless it was simply to be unconventional), but I think the story is interesting enough to be told in a straightforward manner (and indeed, would have benefited from this). ( )

A tour-de-force. Boyle takes on the voices of Wright's women--his crazy, self-centered mistress Miriam, a more manipulative, vicious woman I've seldom met in literature or in life, his lovely mistress Mamah, and his wife who bore him many children but got nothing at all from him. Whether the noveistl creates these women accurately, I have no idea, but I couldn'[t put it down. Boyle's use of foreshadowing--we know about what happens to Mamah and Taliesin as we begin but we don't get to see those years in Wright's life even though they preceded the arrival of Miriam until the end of the novel. Somehow this kind of liberty with the narrative chronology worked wonderfully. It's a powerful book about a man I can't imagine loving, a life I can't imagine living, and at least one woman whom I detested yet who fascinated me that she could be so detestable, such a fraud, yet manage to "get" Wright.
I've lent it to my friend Barbara Putnam though told her that it would not help her understand Wright as an architect--but perhaps it might shine light on him as a person. ( )

A little different from "Love Frank" the story is told by an apprentice of LLoyd's and is done in backward chronology. A bit much if you have already read "Love FranK" but a more complete story of all the women. Less detail on the architecture.

Started it. Didn't like it. Too wordy. ( )

I liked this book a lot better than Loving Frank - for one thing the writing was better, and for another it dealt with all his wives. The perspective, that of one of his Japanese acolytes, was interesting. A long, fascinating, fast-moving story about an incredible narcissist and his, for the most part, nutty wives. ( )

The Women, by T.C. Boyle, is a novel that depicts the relationships the famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright had with four women in his life. Boyle creates a narrator for this saga, one Sato Tadashi, a young man from Japan who reveres the famous architect and has come to Wisconsin to be one of Wright's apprentices at Taliesin.

Even though this is a novel, and Tadashi is an invented character, almost all the events depicted in this book are known to be true. I found Boyle's way of expanding on these facts to be fascinating, and I also really liked Tadashi. He is an excellent vehicle to speak for the apprentices, who paid tuition to Wright so that they could work their backsides off, spending more time at their farm chores than at their drawing boards. Tadashi also has the bad luck of being at Taliesin during the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and so spends WWII in an internment camp. I kept forgetting that Tadashi was a fictional man, Boyle's deft depiction of how these obscure apprentices sacrificed years of their lives to be near greatness, and also a reminder of the prejudices of the times.

Boyle chooses to introduce us to these women in reverse order, going back in time, since Tadashi arrives in the 1930s in time to meet Wrieto-San's last wife. However, I will mention them in chronological order, as is my wont:

Wright's first wife was Catherine "Kitty" Tobin, just seventeen years old when she married him in 1899. They had six children. Boyle does not fill in many details of this relationship for us, since Kitty must have had her hands full with children and housework, while Frank was out hustling commissions to support his large family. The one common thread stitched into all these stories is that Frank doesn't pay his bills. Kitty is the one who is left to feel uncomfortable everytime she gets groceries, being constantly reminded of their ever-growing debt. Frank is oblivious to these--little troubles, and always seems to have everything he wants.

Speaking of that, it is not long before Frank decides that he wants to be married to the wife of one of his clients. While designing a house for Edwin Cheney, he runs off to Europe with Edwin's wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. They both abandon their spouses and children in an act that is seen as immoral and selfish, and the scandal that follows almost ruins Frank's career. Kitty doesn't even know of this until the reporters come for her statement. This was Frank at his cruelest.

Frank and Mamah lived together without the benefit of marriage, and for this they were generally shunned, especially Mamah. (Frank's women always suffered.) It was somewhat ironic that Mamah was very much interested in the feminist movement and working on a translation of a feminist writer's work while living at Taliesin, the home Frank built for the two of them, when she was tragically murdered by a servant named Julian Carlton. ( Taliesin murders ) Seven people were murdered that day, including Mamah's visiting children, who were 12 and 9 years old. I found myself worrying about the fate of the murderer's young wife Gertrude, who was certainly not involved. The motive is still unknown, but Boyle imagines a very likely one.

Soon after Mamah's shocking death, while Frank is still mourning and vulnerable, a woman named Maude "Miriam" Noel insinuates her way into his life, and this is the start of a very bad time; Miriam is portrayed as the worst kind of opportunist, and she was definitely addicted to morphine. This marriage is over within a year, and while Frank is separated from Miriam, he meets Olga Lazovich Hinzenburg, or Olgivanna for--short, who will be his last wife.

His early days with Olgivanna are marred by Miriam. The way she torments, harasses, and actually stalks Frank and Olgivanna, even after being offered a very reasonable divorce settlement, would probably land Miriam in jail today, or at least rehab. Actually, my only real criticism of this novel is that there's too much Miriam in it, even though I realize that Frank's battle with her lasted a long time, possibly three times longer than their short marriage. In short, it was incredibly ugly and tedious.

Overall, I enjoyed this novel very much, and can see why Boyle decided to portray Wright's wives in reverse order, since it made for a more climatic ending than the other way around. How Frank Lloyd Wright managed to create such marvelous work with all this going on in the background is a mystery. ( )

I usually persevere with a book but I just couldn't get that interested in Frank Lloyd Wright's various wives/women. and so I gave up. And those footnotes! Authorly self-indulgence in spades. ( )

“The Women” in the recent book by TC Boyle are the three wives that occupied much of the adult life of super architect Frank Lloyd Wright. This is familiar territory for TC Boyle, who recently chronicled the life of sex research pioneer Alfred Kinsey. In fact, there are some important parallels between the men. Both were driven to be the best at what they did, both were impatient task masters with their workers, both inspired these same workers to be virtual servants. In important ways, both men attracted groupies—both male and female. The morality of both men also caused them serious problems and both struggled mightily against the puritanical prudishness of Middle America in the first half of the twentieth century. Both men also strayed from their wives. But while Kinsey remained more or less devoted to one woman, Wright was more of a serial monogamist. In particular, the three women he chose to marry each changed his life in major and often unpredictable ways. The way that Boyle tells the Wright story is also distinctive. He gives each of the three wives a major section to tell her story and he begins with wife number three and works backward in time to Wright’s first wife. The fact that we learn about Wright through his wives produces a memorable kind of biography. I kept feeling like Wright was being built up from the inside out, where we get interpretations of his feelings and emotions and attitudes but always one step removed from the author of these attitudes and emotions. The biography is rendered even more complex by the fact that each wife has a distinctly different image of Wright and because the story is told through the wives’ eyes, we never really know if these differences are produced by their differing interpretations or because Wright really was s different person in each relationship. One thing about Wright is clear: he needed a woman in his life. He was clearly incomplete without a female companion and despite the enormous pain that the women in his life caused him, he remained utterly devoted to the transformative hope of marriage. And perhaps one of his strongest characteristics as a human being is that he inspired women to love him—sometimes too deeply and destructively for anyone’s own good. Boyle’s decision to reverse the order of the wives in time also works as a literary strategy. While the chronological order complicates the story telling, it provides a very natural, and in the end, very moving progression. And above all this is a well written account, packed full of sentences like this: “The sky hadn’t yet gone fully dark—it was a deep glowing tincture, of cobalt shading to black in the east, a western sky, poked through with the glittering holes of the stars—but the grounds were dense with shadow.” You come for the story but stay for the writing. ( )

Audiobook. I adore the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. I read "Loving Frank"--based on biography--and leaned that he's not exactly a nice guy. That book focuses on his first mistress who was murdered. This book tells the story of Momah but also his final two wives. Probably wouldn't finish the book if I wasn't interested in Wright. I didn't do this for Boyle. The somewhat interesting narrative technique here: the story is told by a Japanese interna who works with Wright for years until WW2 engulfs him. He collaborates on his story of Wright with the husband of his Japanese daughter (the "author" loves an American but marries a Japanese woman, in large part because Wright, the Japanese lover, doesn't want his Japanese intern involved with an American girl) who is Irish. I'm not entirely sure what this is all about. But the story of the author is an additional story in the book. I finished the book--largely because I love Wright's architecture. And now I'm interested in that poor murdered woman. But I still don't think this is about Boyle. So I think that's my review. ( )

Marriage and love certainly do have a relationship, and strange bedfellows they may be. This is the fictionalized biography of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright's four 'women': his first young wife and mother of his children, Kitty; her friend Mamah - liberated free-thinking translator of Ellen Key's feminist ideas; the notorious drug-addicted hateful Miriam; and finally the exotic Olgivanna. Every one of them tortured in her own way by Frank's arrogance and by the slavering gossip-loving press of the day.
Arrogance is at the center of Frank's personality. He sees to the common little people as a different species subject to laws that should not, could not be applied to a genius such as himself. Look after the luxuries, he says, and the necessities will take care of themselves. `Slow-pay Frank`his employees call him.
The book is written in a kind of reverse cronological order, which ends up making sense. Of course the best ending is Mamah`s dramatic story, so I can see why the author chose this structure. The narrator`s voice works, especially with the many curious footnotes. **** ( )

I have a bit of a star-struck love for TC Boyle, but this novel made my head buzz with the pestering question: 'Why?'

Frank Lloyd Wright is entirely hate-able and without merit. That doesn't by any means immediately discount the story, but there isn't anything to balance his objectionable personality. The women in his life--from whose perspective, via an interstitial Japanese apprentice intern narrator, this novel is built--are little better. Miriam, FLW's second wife, is repellent enough to be laughably unrealistic.

The tale, told in reverse-chronological order, unwinds the dramatic coil of Wright's libido, which apparently ran rampant and unchecked through the first half of the 20th century. His ego borders on the ludicrous and incredible, making the motives of his fawning paramours hard to reconcile. There are pockets of sensitivity and good historical insight, but the majority of the book involves jilted lovers and wives stomping around and dropping ultimatums and hiring lawyers.

Boyle does have a good ability to jibe smartly at the pseudo-ennobling movements of the early 20th century--those apotheosized under the banner of artistic license and the elevation of romantic love, but as shallow and baseless as the institutions they seek to shatter. Wright's use of free love tenets coming back to bite him are priceless.

But mostly this novel creates a gnawing, loveless null. ( )

I picked up this book because I have long had a fascination with Frank Lloyd Wright. The women of the title are his first wife, Kitty, his mistress, Mamah Borthwicke Cheney, his third wife, Mariam, and his fourth wife, Olgivvanna. While the book is definitely better than Nancy Horan's Loving Frank, which I read about a year ago, it has several odd flaws.

First, Boyle starts with a fictional narrator, one of Wright's young Japanese apprentices; but this narrator comes and goes. After all, since he doesn't arrive at Taliesin until the 1940s, where Wright was ensconced with his third wife, there's no way that Tadashi can relate the stories of the Mrs. Wrights #1 and #2 or of Mamah Cheney. So at one moment we're getting his point of view, and at the next we're shifting to an omniscient third person narrator. Add to this that I don't think Tadashi really adds much to the story, aside from being able to describe the milieu of Taliesin and, at one point, to reveal that the supposedly liberal-minded Wright had some racist inclinations. Tadashi's own romances and marriage and a brief reference to a stint in an internment camp are stuck in without really adding much to the novel.

The plot jumps from one time frame to another, again with no clear intention. While it seems that Boyle is working backwards through the women in Wright's life, there are frequent leaps, both backwards and forwards in time, within each woman's story. One might think that Boyle is trying to illustrate a pattern in Wright's affairs or the type of woman to whom he was attracted, but such a pattern never becomes clear.

Overall, I'd have to say that this was fairly interesting reading but perhaps trying a bit too hard to be something more than just a good piece of fictionalized biography. ( )

The story of the wild and crazy love life of Frank Lloyd Wright, so familiar to anyone who has read any of the numerous biographies or Wright's own autobiography, is given new life and added dimension in this fictionalized telling. Boyle has brought new depth and insight to this tale that reads like a thriller, yets rings so plausibly true.

Well written book. This was my first introduction to Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, and the author does a good job of shedding a different perspective on the master by looking at the women in his life. Of course, the novel is fiction, so as a reader I'm not sure what I have taken away from it.

Wright is presented to us by Boyle as a genius with an incredible passion that spans both his professional and personal life. In an age of modesty he goes against social norms and follows his heart and lets everyone else be damned, especially his creditors. The great love of his life is brutally murdered, and he's then set upon by a vengeful, unstable woman with whom he shares a fiery marriage. I like to think that, as told by Boyle, Wright finds again a match for his soul once he escapes the unstable Miriam, and ends his life happy. ( )