Just a Better Story Teller -- Wisconsin Take Two

The Women is T. C. Boyle's latest novel and it is a variation on the story that the Slackers selected for Wisconsin, Loving Frank, about Frank Lloyd Wright and his mistress Mamah Cheney, for whom he built Taliesin. That novel, as my review of May 4 noted, is more a delving into the motivation, anxiety and self-articulation of Mamah than it is a portrait of an architect and his influence on what parts of America came to look like and value.

Boyle's rendition is more dimensionalized. Kitty, the first wife, and Anna, his mother, are portrayed similarly as in Horan's book. New perspectives are introduced that emphasize other angles of Wright's personality: Miriam, the poseur and morphine addict, who seduced him with solace after Mamah's death, and Olga, his last wife, who finally makes his house more of a home.

After reading the second novel, Wright's architectural style became clearer to me, yet more symbolic, representing an articulation of his personal traits and needs. He wanted to create comfort, a retreat -- but he wanted to work there as well. He wanted light to stream in through windows without shades -- but he wanted no outsider to look inside. He wanted buildings to grow out of the earth organically -- but he also wanted them to float, unbounded.

It is this last tension that lends itself to a comparison with Wright's moral and ethical decisions. He has to be free to attract adoring women who are ornamental; however, he not only introduces them as his household staff, but actually expects they will cook for his construction crews and apprentices. He manages to dress his women in his own designs, given any occasion, and decorate them and each room of Taliesin to his exacting taste; yet, he leaves them with the responsibility and embarrassent of having to deal with mountains of unpaid bills for such ornaments and luxuries. He continues his extramarital affairs, publically flaunting community values, only to repeatedly become a fugitive until he and his current lover are found yet again by the press or angry spouses.

Boyle employs more literay devices to make the story captivating. Using a Japanese apprentice as the narrator allows both Frank and his women to be examined at more arm's lenght, whereas the Horan novel is more simpatico to Mamah. Oddly enough, it is Boyle's persona of Tadashi as Wright's contemporary that makes the novel read less romantically, less nostalgically. The interpretive footnotes not only help to cross reference the flashback plot, but also permit Boyle himself to intrude at his comic and erudite best.

Because Boyle involves more characters in the novel, its themes of heritage vs. alienation, of homeland vs. the allure of the foreign, of image vs practicality, of the nagging daily details of life vs personal destiny, and of the quest for fame vs. its manipulated publicity, are more evident as they find expression from every quarter, in all characters.

The Women closes out my trip to Wisconsin, but Boyle himself detours me to The Road to Wellville to Battlecreek, Michigan and cornflake king Kellogg and from there back to California, to the Riven Rock estate near Montecito, to meet the son of Cyrus McCormick, he of reaper fame.