The Women - Softcover

T. Coraghessan Boyle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1408803607 ISBN 13: 9781408803608

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2010

Synopsis

A dazzling novel of Frank Lloyd Wright, told from the point of view of the women in his life

Having brought to life eccentric cereal king John Harvey Kellogg in The Road to Wellville and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in The Inner Circle, T.C. Boyle now turns his fictional sights on an even more colorful and outlandish character: Frank Lloyd Wright. Boyle's account of Wright's life, as told through the experiences of the four women who loved him, blazes with his trademark wit and invention. Wright's life was one long howling struggle against the bonds of convention, whether aesthetic, social, moral, or romantic. He never did what was expected and despite the overblown scandals surrounding his amours and very public divorces and the financial disarray that dogged him throughout his career, he never let anything get in the way of his larger-than-life appetites and visions. Wright's triumphs and defeats were always tied to the women he loved: the Montenegrin beauty Olgivanna Milanoff; the passionate Southern belle Maud Miriam Noel; the spirited Mamah Cheney, tragically killed; and his young first wife, Kitty Tobin. In The Women, T.C. Boyle's protean voice captures these very different women and, in doing so, creates a masterful ode to the creative life in all its complexity and grandeur.

About this title

About the Author

T.C. Boyle has written eleven novels (including World's End, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Drop City, a National Book Award finalist) and eight collections of stories. His stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, The Atlantic, McSweeney's, and The Paris Review. He lives in the first of Frank Lloyd Wright's California designs, which will celebrate its centennial this year.

From AudioFile

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright earned his fame for building modern houses that redefined the correlation between form and function. This novel is a fictional version of his complicated and scandalous personal life, which included three wives and a mistress. The author is a master storyteller who takes literary license but never loses sight of his subject's humanity. Narrator Grover Gardner has a deep nasal tone that, remarkably, sounds like an old radio broadcaster's voice. This fits the mood of the book perfectly since the story takes place in the 1930s. Gardner is adept at employing pauses and emphasis to accentuate Boyle's prodigious vocabulary, and while he gives his characters inflections that set them apart, he doesn't change his pitch appreciably for female voices. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1408803607
• ISBN 13: 9781408803608
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 451