Novel Reveals Wright's 'Women'

“So we’ve concocted a fiction, and its nothing to me, really, you know how I feel about these biddies meddling and gossiping and trying to control people’s lives—what I mean is, I’m telling people you’re the new housekeeper,” is how Frank Lloyd Wright introduces his latest mistress Olgivanna Miljanova to his estate Taliesin. He seems to expect that she will accept her new title without protest or even remark. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she does. Such is the charismatic power and authority with which T.C. Boyle imbues the enigmatic Frank Lloyd Wright in “The Women.” Boyle reveals that despite his unabashedly outrageous and callous behavior, his women throw themselves down at his feet time and again. Somehow, it’s difficult to imagine that the scion of a female Montenegrin general (one whose Turkish enemies wanted her drawn and quartered) would take the apparent demotion to “housekeeper” so sedately, but in Boyle’s world, Wright pulls this line off not once, but twice.

The figure of Wright provides the punctuation mark to a narrative that is told from almost every perspective except his own. The central character’s silence creates a whirling vacuum of misplaced, fervid emotion, as every other character struggles to ensnare Wright’s interest and attention. The foremost question of the book (what is Wright really thinking?) is never answered: instead we begin with the ruminations of Sato Tadashi, a fictional apprentice of Wright’s.

Tadashi’s first-person narration frames the third-person of Wright’s lovers’ perspectives, among others. His voice alternates seemingly at random between the different character’s viewpoints, somewhat haphazardly revealing pertinent details of their inner lives as they relate to the story. He also provides a relatively detached critical insight into the more volatile personalities at work; this distance offers some respite from the roiling, overheated emotion of the female protagonists. Tadashi, amusingly, does not neglect to insert his own opinions into the other narratives, in the form of slightly snide footnotes and cross-references to previously mentioned information.

Boyle clearly has a gift for the compelling. As the self-appointed narrator of this tale, Tadashi illustrates the life of the so-called apprentices who sign up to learn from Wright at Taliesin (both his home and studio) and instead find themselves relegated to washing dishes, peeling potatoes, and working in the fields. Tadashi remains deeply devoted to Wright, despite his awareness of the man’s destructive narcissism. This alone would be an intriguing subject, but the true focus of the novel centers around the emotional vagaries of Wright’s women.

As Virgil wrote, “varium et mutabile semper femina,” or, “Woman is ever fickle and changing.” Boyle appears to be unable to shake his fascination with Maude Miriam Noel Wright, Wright’s third great love and second wife. Maude aggrandizes herself as the erstwhile “Belle of Memphis,” and by the time she meets Wright, her self-obsession has collapsed into pure solipsism, not without the help of a casual morphine addiction. “Yes, she’d hidden her kit from Frank as much as possible and from Leora too, not that she was ashamed or in danger of becoming a morphinomane or anything of that nature, but because her medicines were a private affair and no one else’s…” Boyle masterfully conveys the relentless paranoia of this deranged woman. Her uncontrollable fits of rage lead her to attack Wright like a force of nature—at one point she even demolishes the interior of his house with an axe.

Maude’s corrosive fury runs through the book, holding an irresistible sway over the reader, and Boyle himself, apparently. When the narrative turns to other characters, the memory of Maude’s madness and spiritual degradation colors the rest of the book.

Despite its masterful evocation of character and tone, “The Women” does not gain a sense of focus that is as compelling as the personalities that color its pages until the last section of the book. This section is devoted to the numinous Mamah, the woman for whom Wright left his first wife of 20 years. Mamah seems to have sent him into a spiral of fervent public defiance of the contemporary behavioral norms. As her story unfolds, details that previously seemed extraneous begin to fall into place. Though the reader knows how the story will end, the sense of foreboding and the emotional impact in the final cataclysm does not diminish. The florid effervescence of the rest of the work ends on a genuinely somber and powerfully affective note, hinting at what Boyle might accomplish if all his work could be as tightly constructed as this last segment.

Boyle does not shy away from portraying every dimension, and every sordid detail, of his characters. Much is made of how often the characters sweat in the novel. They sweat while driving, lost in the steppes of rural Wisconsin and searching for Wright’s semi-mythical Taliesin. They sweat in the taxi driving through the sweltering heat of Tiajuana, in search of their next morphine fix. They sweat as they spend sleepless nights in jail cells, separated from their children.

Much like Jonathan Swift—specifically in his satire “The Lady’s Dressing Room”—Boyle seems determined to expose the raw humanity behind ideals of free love and art—the age and decay of the flesh hidden beneath elaborate outfits and artfully applied rouge. Or perhaps Boyle merely wishes to debunk the notion that people in the early to mid 1900s did not sweat—they glistened.