Tom Coraghessan Boyle, in some 20 books, has energetically demon- strated his enthusiasm for turning the bio- graphies of figures from early 20th-century American life into quasi-historical fiction. After writing the story of the sex-obsessed researcher Dr Alfred Kinsey and the rare tale of the inventor of the cornflake, Will Keith Kellogg and his health farm, perhaps it was inevitable that the roaring private life of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright would be a natural sequel.

The Women is certainly not a novel about architecture, although the narrator of the story, Tadashi Sato, is a young Japanese architectural student who is drawn to the studio/commune run by Wright at Taliesin in Wisconsin. This is a skilful device, his name means ‘correct’ in Japanese, and he acts as a kind of moral compass to the activities of the wayward architect. He admires Wright as a creative genius and bows low in his presence, while coolly observing his arrogance and cruelty. He is helped in the telling of this complex tale by his invention of an Irish American co-author / translator — one Seamus O’Flaherty whose sharp footnotes are of course the clear voice of Mr T. C. Boyle nudging the reader to see things his way.

There were four key women in Frank Lloyd Wright’s life. His first wife Kitty Tobin, whom he married in 1889, gave him six children, but she only comes to life as Wright leaves her for the wife of one of his clients, a neighbour in Chicago’s Oak Park, Martha ‘Mamah’ Borthwick Cheney. Mamah translated Swedish feminist literature and believed in a life of physical passion, happily dumping her children to escape with Wright to Germany while they waited for their divorces. They returned in an atmosphere of scandal to Wisconsin where, undaunted, Wright built a home and studio called Taliesin (Welsh for shining brow) but soon christened by the press ‘Wright’s Love Bungalow’. When a disgruntled servant killed Mamah, two children and four employees and then burnt the place down, the ‘hyenas’, as Wright called the press, revelled in the intensity of the drama.

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