The Women: T.C. Boyle

Frank Lloyd Wright is one of those figures who, to me, seem strangely enigmatic despite having a prolific life and personality. Think about it. What do you know about FLW? That he designed beautiful houses? The Prairie Style? Oak Park and Chicago homes? Falling Water and Taliesin?

Did you know he scandalously had three wives and one long-term lover, including a feminist writer, free-love advocating sculptor, and Russian dancer and intellect? That a household staff member horrifically killed the lover and her two small children with an axe before burning down Taliesin I?

No, I hadn't either until relatively recently. The always impeccable Ken Burns did a documentary on his life a few years ago, and whilst I didn't watch all of it I caught bits and pieces that made me double-take my thoughts on the architect, about whom I'd known little about outside of his designs. I was uneasy about his relationship with women, and appalled by the actions of one man who so ruthlessly killed the innocent. So when T.C. Boyle released his latest novel based around the women of FLW's life, I knew I had to read it.

Told mostly from the perspective of three of these women, third wife Olgivanna, second wife Miriam, and mistress (between first and second wives) Mamah, The Women is further framed as the biography of FLW as told by one of his Japanese apprentices and his son-in-law, taking the reader several steps away from the architect by frame after frame. You're forced to step back to view the architect through the eyes of those closest to them, and let the chips fall where they may.

But somehow Boyle's Wright is still an active character. Though he is seen much through the eyes of the women around him - and the men writing the women - Wright is still omnipresent, an active agent as well as a passive recipient of what fate rains down upon him. In doing so, we get a unique view of Wright: a fellow with mothering issues who disdains the mother of his own children; a man who adored and kept so many apprentices who were like family as he shuns his own; a man who was led by the women around him as much as he led the others in his sway; a man whose incomparable control would rule the lives of all around him. Wright is presented as a man of opposites, living in the uncomfortable tension in the narrow space between his idiosyncrasies.

The backwards-biography of the novel also provides a constant tension between the perception of self and the perception of others: we first learn about Miriam, FLW's second wife, from Olgivanna, his third wife, and so forth. Olgivanna, Wright's third and final wife, may seem weary and domineering in her story, presented first; the struggles with the seemingly mad Miriam almost read like the making of almost a French farce while Olgivanna quietly and passionately protects her own. However when we read Miriam's section - Olgivanna not even a twinkle in anyone's eye at that time in the past - we see a passionate woman filled with avant guarde emotions and artistic ambitions, a woman devoted to Wright and (it must be said) to herself and her morphine addiction.

By the time you reach Mamah's story it's difficult to believe that there even could be more, but Mamah's section was almost the most interesting to me. Presented at the time when Wright was extricating himself from his long marriage from first wife Catherine, Mamah is seen as an opposite to Catherine: free, educated, intelligent, and willing to break from the mores of an upper middle class society which had reared her and left her without hope for anything more from life. By the time you reach the horrific surroundings of her murder and the murder of her two children, you find yourself quietly on the side of this woman who, had she lived, would have possibly made Wright's life so very different. For the better or for the worse, in terms of his architectural and aesthetic achievements, I couldn't say, but the death of Mamah at the end of this three-part novel is no secret as it is teased upon throughout. This moment was a defining one of Wright's life, and the structure of the novel only tells you of it last though you've been hearing droplets of this tale from the start.

What we're left with is a frame within a frame and a sense of both intimately knowing the architect but concurrently still seeing him through a veil, which was a grand way of presenting the world around America's most celebrated architect. And still you're left feeling the farce of it all, the pricking of the pomposity that made Wright into both a great architect and a ridiculous man. "Law and rules are made for the average," he tells reporters as he and Mamah are trying to justify their lives together. The Frank Lloyd Wright of The Women clearly believes this and lives by it, knowing he is no average man. The Frank Lloyd Wright of the book if a pompous ass, a gloried artist, a sufferer of arrested development, a man both cold and filled with passion, and a person with an overriding sense that simply being Frank Lloyd Wright was excuse enough for anything that he might do. The books manages to both glorify him without singing excessive praise, and ridicule him without resorting to cruelty, but overall reminds us of the lives lived in his wake. Forget Falling Water, Taliesin, and remember Olgivanna, Miriam, Mamah, and Kitty for awhile.