That’s what one reviewer calls Frank Lloyd Wright, the great architect and the inspiration for two recent novels.
In Nancy Horan’s popular book Loving Frank, fact and fiction are interwoven into a feminist theme. When an intelligent and vibrant, but unfulfilled woman plunges into love and lust with the architect planning her family’s new house, she is vilified for following her heart and leaving her husband and two young children to flee to Europe. Wright left behind his wife and six children, but it was Mamah Borthwick Cheney who shocked the world by acting like “an unnatural mother.” Horan crafts the story into the motherhood vs. fulfillment issue still being examined in its various permutations today.
This book has become a favorite of book clubs; it is part of the Speaking of Books collection with multiple copies & discussion guide available.
Coming in February is T. Coraghessan Boyle’s newest novel, The Women. The women of the title are Wright’s four great loves, to whom he turned whenever stress escalated into duress in his life. The narrator is a Japanese architectural student working gratis at Wright’s Wisconsin estate, Taliesin. Two mistresses, soul mate Mamah and first wife Kitty are “The Women.” Boyle writes lavishly with rhetorical flair about American success-and-failure stories, including The Road to Wellville (about John Harvey Kellogg) and The Inner Circle (about Alfred Kinsey.)
Frank Lloyd Wright lived from 1867-1959. More books on the architecture and creative influence of this seminal influence of the 20th century.
