מאת T. C. Boyle
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.
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.
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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. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
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March 30, 2009
Rising and falling in steady rhythm, soothing even when the story unsettles and surprises, Grover Gardner's voice is a fine instrument. He delivers a stellar rendition of Boyle's reimagining of Frank Lloyd Wright's tortured relationships with his wives and lovers—and his obsession with Taliesin, his home in Wisconsin, which suffered no less than the architect or his women. Gardner, a regular prize-winner who's done more than 650 audiobooks, is familiar to audio listeners, but he strikes new notes, hurdling over difficult names and nimbly skipping from character to character. Readers will be entirely immersed in the hothouse world of the architect and his women. A Viking hardcover
(Reviews, Nov. 17). -
Starred review from June 15, 2009
In his trademark style, Boyle (www.tcboyle.com) uses a fictional narrator to tell the story of an American original: Frank Lloyd Wright, that flamboyant genius of 20th-century architecture. The tale unfolds through the experiences of four women who loved Wright: the Montenegrin beauty Olgivanna Milanoff, the passionate Maude Miriam Noel, the spirited Mamah Borthwick Cheney, and Wright's devoted first wife, Catherine "Kitty" Tobin. Narrator Grover Gardner, a "Publishers Weekly" Narrator of the Year (2005), navigates the complicated story line with ease, reading with a distinctive clipped accent that could almost be Japanese (the novel's narrator is Wright apprentice Tadashi Sato, newly arrived from Japan). An excellent choice for fans of popular and literary fiction. [Audio clip available through www.blackstoneaudio.com; the Viking hc was recommended "for most fiction collections," "LJ" 12/08.Ed.]Nann Blaine Hilyard, Zion-Benton P.L., ILCopyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
- Newsweek 'America’s most imaginative contemporary novelist.'
