The Women (T. C. Boyle)

spheres, Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona
Originally uploaded by lumierefl

"Writing a novel is like building a house", said T. C. Boyle in an interview about his latest novel, "The Women".

There's an excerpt from "The Women" on Boyle's site.

"The Women" is a fictional portrait of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright's life, as seen through the prism of four women significant to him: Kitty Tobin, his first wife, mother of his six children, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, a scholar of the women's movement (who is brutally murdered with her children by a butler while Wright is at work in Chicago),the morphine addicted artist Maud Miriam Noel, and the Montenegrin dancer Olgivanna Milanoff. Parts of the novel are told by a fictional Japanese apprentice, Tadashi Sato.

The book gripped me from start to finish. I read the (about 420 pages) in one day and a few nightly hours. In English. Boyle shows Wright in great complexity, self-centered, egotistic, as a genius, overwhelmingly creative and versatile, charming and despotic, in a chaotic, restless life.

Of course, I've looked at all those beautiful houses on the internet. T.C.Boyle himself lives in one of Wright's houses in California. The prairie houses must be extraordinary to live in. Wright must have been far ahead of his time, with his ideas of natural, organic living, his democratic ideas on building houses. I never had the slightest interest for architecture - but now I do.

At least I was in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York a few years ago.

There's a talk given by T.C.Boyle, quite amusing. Lydia, if you listen to this, don't take the part about Oregon personal. :-)