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Dec 04, 2009

Abby rated it:

I really wanted to like this book because I like the subject matter of Frank Lloyd Wright. However, it seems like TC Boyle merely read several biographies of Wright and then compressed them into loosely fictionalized vignettes in this novel.

The narrator's voice is probably the most confusing and least attractive aspect. The narrator's voice is presumably that of a Japanese foreign exchange student who works as an apprentice at Frank Lloyd's Wright's Midwestern Taliesin -- this is re More...

3 comments like (12 people liked it)

Feb 16, 2009

Justin rated it:

In his new work, "The Women," the endlessly imaginative novelist T.C. Boyle sets his sights on the gifted architect Frank Lloyd Wright, a larger-than-life figure whose colorful exploits seem an ideal fit for Boyle's love of protagonists both epic and flaky (see "The Road to Wellville," "The Inner Circle" and many more).

Boyle's rendition of Wright strides about with appropriate ferocity, "a repository of playfulness and merriment ... that only undersco More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Mar 07, 2009

Ann rated it:

I've come to the conclusion that I'm just a wimp when it comes to books about FLW. I know what the ending will be, and as I approach the final pages, I find myself reading slower and slower, putting off the inevitable. The same thing happened with Loving Frank. Maybe it's because I've been to Taliesen, plus my MIL grew up near Spring Green and has her own stories about Wright and crew. Since I don't have to expend any effort visualizing the setting, I can let my imagination run wild visualiz More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Feb 20, 2009

Jeff rated it:

An absolutely terrific book – well-researched, consummately written, and addictively readable! I really feel Boyle is at his best when he writes biographical fiction; "The Women" is a wonderful addition to an already astounding canon of his bio-inspired work, which includes "The Road to Wellville" and "The Inner Circle."

This new novel tells the interwoven stories of the women in Frank Lloyd Wright’s life -- steadfast and obstinate Kitty Tobin Wright; er More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Apr 15, 2009

Bookmarks Magazine rated it:

T. C. Boyle has written many biographical novels, but critics weren't sure that this effort fully succeeds. All agreed that Boyle is a graceful stylist whose writing, noted the Washington Post, "will reward you in the last scene of this altogether predictable and (sometimes deliciously) overwrought novel." While mostly adhering to the facts, melodramatic it is. That didn't seem to be the major problem, though. Many reviewers thought that the fictional narrator Tadashi Sato, writing a b

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2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 01, 2009

Tony rated it:

Boyle, T. C. THE WOMEN. (2009). *****. I’ve always been impressed with the writing ability of this author, whose other novels include, “Drop City,” and “The Road to Wellville.” This novel (and you have to remember that it is a novel) is about four women in the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. The author chose to work backwards from his last wife, Olgivanna Milanoff, an exotic woman from Montenegro who had been a student of the Russian mystic, Gurdjieff. Before her, there was Maude Miriam Noel, More...

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Feb 05, 2012

Frank rated it:

As usual, Boyle's exquisite prose makes this book worthwhile. It tells the story of Frank Lloyd Wright and his 3 wives and mistress, Mamah Cheney. Previous to reading this book, I knew practically nothing about Wright other than that he was considered probably the greatest architect of the last century. I didn't realize he had so much public scandal relating to his mistresses and wives! Wright's genius kind of gets lost in the narrative - the book is divided into 3 sections and is told in revers More...

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Jan 18, 2012

Sean rated it:

As an Oak Park boy I thought I knew all there was to know about Frank Lloyd Wright. A field trip to The Home & Studio was an annual one for an Oak Park student. Yet this book gave a whole new side of the story.

Like many egotistical geniuses Frank Lloyd Wright was brilliant, inspiring, determined, self-involved, and just a little bit CRAZY especially in relating to the women in his life as you will find.

The historical fiction based on real events is narrated by Tadashi S More...

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Nov 01, 2011

Talia rated it:

Frank's women problems....

Frank Lloyd Wright was a genius who changed the way we think of architecture--and execute it. But his free spirit that allowed him to break the rules, also caused him to flaunt other traditions and to clash time and again with the mores of his time.

Narrated through the Japanese apprentice, Boyle can also step back and give the reader detailed expositions that would have been otherwise clumsy when telling the stories of each of Frank's women. Wit More...

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Oct 05, 2011

Audrey ❦❦❦ rated it:

The story is told in reverse chronological order by Tadashi Sato, a Japanese-American apprentice, whose story is told, along with that of Frank Lloyd Wright's by way of an anecdote (albeit a very lengthy one) at the beginning of each section.

Although I knew the story of his life already, Boyle's detailed and descriptive writing added to the story tremendously, and it was a most vivid movie that played in my head while I was listening to the story.

I hadn't listened to an e More...

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Aug 19, 2011

Anne rated it:

This was a much more successful book than Nancy Horan's "Loving Frank" (see below, where I gave that two stars) but not Boyle's best. It tells the story of the seminal women in Frank Lloyd Wright's life with varying degrees of detail -- possibly due to the varying amounts of source material available about each woman but, I think, more likely based on who was the most fun to write about (which would be crazy drug-addled Maude, whom I got a little tired of despite the fascinating, over- More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 17, 2011

Sandy rated it:

Having just re-read Loving Frank by Nancy Horan, I chose to follow up by reading The Women which provides another fictionalized account of Frank Lloyd Wright's relationships with Mamah Cheney and his three wives. I enjoyed the book although not nearly as much as Loving Frank. As Horan admits there is not a lot of information available regarding Mamah Cheney other than correspondence with Ellen Key and newspaper articles, it was interesting to see the differences between the two author's accoun More...

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Aug 06, 2011

Bungo rated it:

Bit of a weird one, really! A dramatisation (how much, I have no idea as I didn't know a thing about the subject matter prior to reading this) of the life and loves of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, as told by one of his apprentices. The "narrator" also makes copious footnotes on the content as he is Japanese and the book has been translated by his Irish son-in-law (has the son-in-law also translated the footnotes which are sometimes fairly critical of him? Who knows). Anyway, the story More...

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Jul 29, 2011

Laurie added it

After loving T.C. Boyle's humorous send up of the Kellogg universe, I've loved every one of his books until Tortilla Flats, which I found somewhat insulting to Mexican culture. Therefore, I was happy to find Boyle back on his game in this portrayal of the "complications" of Frank Lloyd Wright's love life.

Perhaps because he lives in a house designed by Wright, he seems to channel a lot of the turbulent emotions swirling around the flawed genius. I'm not too interested in architectur More...

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Mar 29, 2011

Stella rated it:

At one time I almost worshipped Frank Lloyd Wright as some sort of demi god, an unmatched creative force who left his mark in organic architecture. Then I startd reading about his personal life and my golden god started to tarnish a bit. By the time I finshed reading this book my demi god had crumbled to pieces.

The book is about..as the title implies...The Women. The women in his life and the book is narrated by a Japanese F.L. Wright apprentice, Tadashi Sato, who calls Mr. Wright More...

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Jan 25, 2011

Robin rated it:

As a fan of the Prairie Style of architecture developed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the little I knew of his complicated personal story, this has been on my to-read list for quite some time. I finished it, but was disappointed.
The third party narration was a bizarre choice. Told by a former Japanese apprentice, Tadashi Sato, yet written at the distance of decade's by Tadashi's granddaughter's husband (an American named O'Flaherty)it is unclear if this is meant to be a formal memoir, or the More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 04, 2011

Rose rated it:

The story of Frank Lloyd Wright's famously passionate love life is told last-woman-first. I wondered, momentarily, whether this was the right approach -- you know all the bad stuff that's going to happen before it does, but I suppose the brilliant TC Boyle figured none of this is exactly news anymore. And in this way he would reveal how every woman in Wright's life was somehow a reaction to the one who came before. This is really a story told in circles within circles, not direct backward moti More...

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Dec 20, 2010

Mary rated it:

I love Frank Lloyd Wright's work, but if T.C. Boyle's account of Wright's personal life is accurate, the genius architect was no prize in the husband/lover department. This kind of historical fiction is fun, taking real life people and situations and bringing them to life with imagined intimate conversations and pretend private thoughts.

The scope of this juicy book is quite wide--painting Wright's four major loves over several decades against the backdrop of his Spring Green, Wiscon More...

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Nov 28, 2010

Jenny rated it:

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/20...

The Wright women
Boyle crafts vivid novel about architect's stormy ties to wives and lover
By Jenny Shank, Special to the Rocky
Published February 12, 2009 at 7 p.m.

When I interviewed T.C. Boyle in 2007, he was at work on The Women, the life of Frank Lloyd Wright from the perspectives of four women in his life. Inspired by the Wright-designed prairie- style house that he lives in, the author said the architect fit in well More...

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Oct 05, 2010

Diane rated it:

The structure of The Women, is both its strength and its weakness. In writing this fictionalized account of Frank LLoyd Wright's wives, lovers, and lovers who became wives, T.C. Boyle drops the reader right into the middle of Wright's life. However, it's not Wright's life that Boyle shines the spotlight on. By using a Japanese young man, an architect in training who has come to Taliesin to study with Wright, as a narrator, Boyle keeps a distance from the story that serves to make the events ring More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Aug 23, 2010

Melissa rated it:

I read this novel at a really strange time. I was listening to the radio and they were talking about loneliness among other things. But there was something really interesting said about loneliness, that there was a prevalence of loneliness today. They were not defining loneliness as being single or living by oneself. They were talking about loneliness in terms of how often people connect and relate to other people. According to the radio there are many people that are married or “coupled” o More...

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Jul 21, 2010

Sherry rated it:

Much has been said - good & bad - about Boyle's choice to formulate this story from the most recent to the long-ago beginning. I admit to being a bit confused at first, but as I caught the fictional Japanese apprentice, Tadashi's, narrative rhythm and became more familiar with the characters, I felt the backwards chronology was without a doubt the best means of portraying Frank Lloyd Wright and his Women.

When we initially meet FLW, he is a far from sympathetic subject...embittered, More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 21, 2010

ICPL added it

T.C. Boyle’s new book, The Women, is a fictional story about four women who were the wives and lovers of the famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. The book is told from the point of view of one of Wright’s interns, Tadashi Sato, and includes the flamboyance, determination, and ego of Wright, as well as the personal, and sometimes tragic, stories and motivations of the women. The story is told in reverse chronological order, which is an interesting approach.

T.C. Boyle has a person More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 20, 2010

Lucy rated it:

This novel tells the stories of the women in Frank Lloyd Wright's life. For some bizarre reason the author has chosen to create and tell part of the story from the point of view of a young Japanese apprentice of Wright's. This character seems superfluous. Then the story is told partly by the women themselves. The author has chosen not to tell the stories of the women chronologically. No idea why. Having already read "Loving Frank," I was familiar with the story of mistress Mamah More...

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May 17, 2010

Susy rated it:

This was my first foray into listening to a book & it was a good experience. I'd read, Loving Frank, which is a fictionalized story about Frank Loyd Wright's romance with Mamah Borthwick, but this book deals with the four women he loved - three of whom he married. The narrator of the piece is a presumably fictional Japanese architect who served as an apprentice at Taliesen in the late 1930's and tells the story anecdotally as a senior citizen looking back on those years and what others knew of More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 03, 2010

Jean rated it:

Frank Lloyd Wright had at least four women in his life and these are their stories. It takes a strong, independent and possibly somewhat crazy woman to put up with the arrogant, self-involved personality of Wright. In fact, it possibly takes a bit of arrogance and a lot of one's own self-involvment. It was a different world at the turn of the 19th century. There was a woman's movement afoot and new ideas about how women could live in the world were being revealed in Europe as well as the Unit More...

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Apr 08, 2010

Evelyn rated it:

Prior to reading this book I've loved everything I've read by T.C. Boyle. I think he's a master storyteller and he has an amazing command of the English language. So when I read that he'd written a book about Frank Lloyd Wright (whose architectural style I've always admired)and the women he was involved with, I couldn't wait to get my hands on the book which was recently released in soft cover.

What a disappointment! I can't say the book was bad exactly, since I read it through and foun More...

1 comment like

Mar 10, 2010

Melinda rated it:

The Women by TC Boyle has an extremely interesting premise: tell the story of the love lives of Frank Lloyd Wright through an uninterested third party. The narrator brings nothing to the story and is beyond superfluous. The narrator also makes use of a lot of footnotes that do nothing except break up the overall storytelling. Relying heavily on footnotes is a very lazy way of writing. The reader has to stop in the middle of sentences and look up the tiny print footnotes and it completely takes o More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Mar 03, 2010

Tara rated it:

T. Coraghessan Boyle's recent biographic novel, "The Women" (2009) examines the life of renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright through the lens of Wright's tempestuous love affairs, which encompassed three wives and one mistress. The narrative is told in reverse chronological order, beginning with Wright's final wife, Olgivanna, and working backwards through Maude Miriam Noel (wife #2), Mamah Borthwick Cheney (mistress and presumptive love of his life), and ending with a section about h More...

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Jan 27, 2010

Dorothy rated it:

T.C. Boyle's book, The Women, is a fictionalized account of the women who fell in love with, lived with, or married the famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. The man was a genius. Of this, there is no doubt. His mother, Anna Lloyd Jones, made certain that he would one day become great from early on. She like the four principle women in his life were mesmerized by his charm, swept into his joie de vivre lifestyle, and proud of his accomplishments.
Wright reveled in all of the attention. More...

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