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The Women

by T.C. Boyle

February 2010

Synopsis

"A dazzling novel of Frank Lloyd Wright, told from the point of view of the women in his life. 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 account of Wright's life, as told through the experiences of the four women who loved him, blazes with his trademark wit and invention. Wright's life was one long howling struggle against the bonds of convention, whether aesthetic, social, moral, or romantic. He never did what was expected and despite the overblown scandals surrounding his amours and very public divorces and the financial disarray that dogged him throughout his career, he never let anything get in the way of his larger-than-life appetites and visions. Wright's triumphs and defeats were always tied to the women he loved: the Montenegrin beauty Olgivanna Milanoff; the passionate Southern belle Maud Miriam Noel; the spirited Mamah Cheney, tragically killed; and his young first wife, Kitty Tobin. In The Women, T.C. Boyle's protean voice captures these very different women and, in doing so, creates a masterful ode to the creative life in all its complexity and grandeur."
(Publisher)

Reviews

"Boyle doesn't just fiddle around with familiar biographical material. He inhabits the space of Wright's life and times with particular boldness…With his rollicking short fiction and with novels that include The Road to Wellville, The Inner Circle and Drop City, Boyle has been writing his own fascinating, unpredictable, alternately hilarious and terrifying fictional history of utopian longing in America. The Women adds a powerful new chapter to this continuing narrative, and it is Boyle at his best. It is a mesmerizing story of women who invest everything, at great risk, in that mysterious "bank of feeling" named Frank Lloyd Wright. " (The New York Times)
"The Women is an altogether manic, occasionally baffling and yet strangely riveting novel…Boyle is a marvel at descriptive prose…So you go on, from scene to scene, marveling at a turn of phrase or some well-articulated emotion. As with a fickle lover, it's the words that keep you there." (The Washington Post)
"The title of the latest installment in Boyle's ongoing series of novels on famous American egomaniacs refers to the many women in Frank Lloyd Wright's scandal-plagued life. Like John Kellogg and Alfred Kinsey, two of Boyle's earlier subjects, the great architect is contemptuous of society's rules of behavior. He elopes with one wealthy client, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, before divorcing his first wife and strays yet again while married to his second wife. Mamah Cheney, an early feminist, took center stage in Nancy Horan's skillful novel Loving Frank(2007). In Boyle's telling, it is the scorned second wife, the slightly faded but still formidable Maude Miriam Noel, who steals the show. Each of the other women gets her due, but there is only one object of lust, and that is the stylish, morphine-popping Miriam. She's a mess, but Boyle clearly loves her, and the reader is richly rewarded. As in all of Boyle's fictional biographies, the lesson is that the charismatic iconoclast is usually a rigid tyrant behind closed doors. This long novel gets off to a slow start but is well worth the effort. "(Edward B. St.John - Library Journal)

Book Club Rating and Comments

If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.

Other Books by T.C. Boyle

'After the Plague'
'America'
'Budding Prospects: A Pastoral'
'Drop City'
'The Inner Circle'
'Riven Rock'
'The Road to Wellville'
'Talk Talk'
'T.C. Boyle Stories'
'Tooth and Claw'
'The Tortilla Curtain'
'World's End'