Frank Lloyd Wright has inspired architects . . . and storytellers. Even during Wright’s life, Ayn Rand sought him out, seeing him as a prototype for Howard Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead. But Wright gave Rand the brush-off, and as a result the novelist needed to rely on her imagination rather than on any first-hand experiences with the famous architect. Since then, the romance between Wright and Mamah Cheney has inspired Daron Hagen’s opera Shining Brow (1993) Nancy Horan’s novel Loving Frank (2007)—with a film in the works—and now T.C. Boyle’s The Women.
Mamah Cheney may have been the tragic love of Wright’s life, and her murder in 1914 at the hands of a crazed servant (who also killed six other members of the household) certainly stands out as the most lurid event in the architect’s often tabloidesque career. But Boyle downplays the sensationalistic aspects here, instead comprehending that Wright’s relationship with Cheney set in motion peculiar behavioral patterns that would echo in his later courtship of (and eventually marriages with) Maude "Miriam" Noel and Olga (Olgivanna) Ivanovna Lazovich. Boyle artfully combines these three romances into the larger narrative of his novel The Women, which explores the paradox of a man who could be an independent thinker and visionary in his public career, but mindlessly trapped in recurring, self-destructive patterns in his private life.
This is not your typical work of historical fiction. Boyle immediately sets out an odd yet strangely effective post-modern context for his story in an introduction that presents the book as written by Tadashi Sato, a Japanese former student of Wright’s, and translated into English by Sato’s Irish-American grandson-in-law, Seamus O’Flaherty. Throughout the novel Sato-san intrudes, via footnotes and discursive introductions to the various sections of the book, in an obtrusive Nabokovian manner. Yet this device, which sounds rather heavy-handed, actually works brilliantly in practice, and some of the finest scenes in the novel take place when the famous architect and his lovers step into the background, and the self-effacing Tadashi Sato takes center stage.
But this is not the only structural twist to a novel that, at times, seems as boldly conceived as one of Wright’s own works. Boyle also decides to reverse the chronological order of the three “love stories” he is presenting in his novel. Thus he starts with the account of Wright’s third marriage, to the Montenegrin dancer and Gurdjieff disciple Olgivanna Lazovich, only then moving on to second wife Miriam Noel, and finally finishing with the story of Mamah Cheney.
This approach both makes evident the recurring patterns in Wright’s love life, and also imparts a pointed ironic tinge to key events in his personal history. The reader may find it hard to repress a wry smile after moving from the opening section of the book, which depicts Miriam Noel as a crazy, vindictive woman who will go to any extreme to wreak havoc on Wright’s life, into the next interlude in Boyle’s story in which this same woman is the architect's idealized and doting lover. Do all of our lives seem so blind and misguided when viewed in reverse? I hope not, but Boyle might make you uneasy on that score.
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