The Women

This book is different, though, to much of the canon of Wright-on literature – after all, the vast majority of FLW-related books are on his physical output, his buildings, and so most of those books are illustration-dominated, many coffee table-sized.

TC Boyle’s flamboyantly creative take on Wright, however, looks at the man – and his lust for life and women. In reverse chronological order, it details his relationship with four of the key women in his life (or five, when you realise he was a bit of a mammy’s boy, building houses and moving back in with her as it suited).

He was married to three of the women whose lives he burst into, and to use a description of the time, was a cad to them all – Lloyd Wright was the tabloid fodder of his day. His first marriage, to Kitty Tobin, lasted more than 20 years and produced six children, and in a footnote in The Women we are told they “came in rapid succession, like plums dropping from a tree.” He plum walked out on the bunch, though, when he took up with a neighbour’s wife, Mameh Borthwick Cheney, who also left her family. Their affair and European elopement scandalised America, and temporarily threatened his career.

Lloyd Wright’s personality was large and domineering, and many were willing to forgive his failings, philandering and craving for fame.

A dandy who feigned a scorn for convention, he nonetheless craved attention, abused his own school of fawning, apprentice architect acolytes, and traded on people’s goodwill as readily as he defrauded many of his clients to fund his lifestyle and the building of his own homes,

So, no golden hero or angel, but boy could he make a pencil sing on paper. His personal life was pure soap opera, but his best buildings were pure opera.

Lloyd Wright was responsible for 1,000 designs and some 500 buildings, including the New York Guggenheim and the iconic Fallingwater House, Pennsylvania. Taliesin, his Wisconsin retreat and dearest to his heart, burned down twice – though one fire was a vicious arson, which claimed eight lives, including one of his lovers.

Clearly, TC Boyle has lots of juicy, red-blooded meat to tuck into here, in the creative take on the reckless genius’s life and loves. Adding to his ironic writing style, Boyle has a particular insight – he has renovated a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house, where his family has lived for 16 years.

The Women is the third of TC Boyle’s dozen or so novels to take as a theme, or its central character, a great American eccentric: he previously covered sex researcher Albert Kinsey’s life in The Inner Circle, and John Harvey Kellogg in The Road to Wellville. He jokes about doing a boxed set of his books on American egomaniacs. Here, Boyle adroitly uses a faux-biography style to distance his own voice from facile moral judgment: egocentric Wright is primarily presented through his relationship with those closest to him over several decades, walk-on parts in his games and grand designs: truly, Frank Lloyd Wright would have loved the computer game the Sims.

The ‘narrator’ of The Women is a Japanese student of Lloyd Wright’s, called Tadashi Sato, who came to Taliesin in 1932 and who recalls those tumultuous, scandal ridden days from the reflective distance of 1979. Tadashi’s own story emerges piecemeal through the book, mainly through the copious use of footnotes; another layer upon a layer, though eye-scanning from narrative text to footnote can be a bit wearying.

In one footnote, Tadashi adjudges that “Wrieto-San was the world’s greatest self-promoter (with the possible exception of PT Barnum).” Ouch.