The Women (Hardcover)
$27.95
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Description
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.
About the Author
T.C. Boyle has written eleven novels (including World's End, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Drop City, a National Book Award finalist) and eight collections of stories. His stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, The Atlantic, McSweeney's, and The Paris Review. He lives in the first of Frank Lloyd Wright's California designs, which will celebrate its centennial this year.
Praise for The Women…
"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."
-The New York Times Book Review
"Boyle doesn't just fiddle around with familiar autobiographical material. He inhabits the space of Wright's life and times with particular boldness...Boyle isn't just a restorer. After gathering the information he'll use to get the motor of invention running, he goes on to create an array of indelible characters - eccentrics so absorbed in the expression of their passions that they fail to notice or care when their actions turn destructive...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."
-The New York Times Book Review
