The Women - Softcover

Boyle, T C

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143116479 ISBN 13: 9780143116479

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2009

Synopsis

A "riveting" (Wall Street Journal) portrait of architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the women in his life - 2017 marks the 150th anniversary of Wright's birth

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 incomparable account of Wright's life is told through the experiences of the four women who loved him. There's the Montenegrin beauty Olgivanna Milanoff, the passionate Southern belle Maude Miriam Noel, the tragic Mamah Cheney, and his young first wife, Kitty Tobin. Blazing with his trademark wit and inventiveness, Boyle deftly captures these very different women and the creative life in all its complexity.

About this title

Review:

TC Boyle has long validated his credentials as one of the most individual writers at work today, with a style and a vision quite unlike that of any of his contemporaries. The Women, his latest book, will add even more lustre to his reputation. It’s a novel that brings to mind the pressure-cooker narratives of William Faulkner, though its subject could not be more different: the life and loves of the most famous of the great American architects, Frank Lloyd Wright.

The imposing estate of Taliesen is a noted feature of rural Wisconsin, and it’s a place where the passions – of all kinds – run high. Reporters haunt the property, hungry for more revelations guaranteed to sell newspapers – because Taliesen is the home of the celebrated architect Frank Lloyd Wright. As well as being the most famous architect of his country in the twentieth century, his celebrity was (and is) world-wide. But his messy private life (as reproduced in Boyle’s novel) is a considerable source of interest and scandal along with his massive artistic achievements. His first wife, Kitty, lives in a world of her own, persuading herself that his other amours are transitory. Then there is his mistress, the passionate and strong-willed Mamah. And there is his deranged second wife, Miriam. And if this weren’t enough of a powder keg, also stirred into the heady brew is Oglivanna, a Serbian immigrant, who shares most closely the turbulence and terror of the architect’s jumbled private life, with Miriam a kind of avenging fury, enlisting a host of pretty officials to get her way. It’s a remarkable scenario (narrated by one of the architect’s apprentices), and Boyle gives it incandescent life, with the character of Frank Lloyd Wright brilliantly conjured at the heart of the unlikely – but compelling – narrative. --Barry Forshaw

Review:

"Wonderfully entertaining . . . In his inexhaustible capacity to beguile us as a natural storyteller, T.C. Boyle is surely one of our most American novelists since Mark Twain, and one of our very best."
--The Boston Globe

"Despite dozens of writers' attempts to capture Wright's story, it seems safe to say that none have rendered it with more crackling life than Mr. Boyle."--The Wall Street Journal

"Boyle at his best . . . Love, not architecture, is the focus here. . . . A mesmerizing story of women who invest everything, at great risk, in that mysterious 'bank of feeling' named Frank Lloyd Wright. . . . Boyle doesn't just fiddle around with familiar autobiographical material. He inhabits the space of Wright's life and times with particular boldness."
--The New York Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0143116479
• ISBN 13: 9780143116479
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464