The Women

A Novel

Plot

IS IT EASY TO LIVE WITH A GENIUS? T.C. Boyle's dazzling new novel, "The Women", will let you know. Having brought to life the eccentric cereal king John Harvey Kellogg in "The Road to Wellville" and sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey in "The Inner Circle", Boyle now trains 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 tempestuous experiences of the four women who loved him, blazes with the author's 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 through 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 to the women he loved: Olgivanna Milanoff, an exotic, imperious Montenegrin beauty who was a student of the Russian mystic Gurdjieff and was known by Wright's apprentices as "the Dragon Lady"; Maude Miriam Noel, a passionate Southern belle with a mean temper and a fondness for morphine; the spirited Mamah Borthwick Cheney, tragically murdered at Wright's Wisconsin estate, Taliesin, in 1914; and his young first wife, Kitty Tobin, with whom he had six children. Each of these four women's stories plays out in a surprising, comedic, and ultimately poignant manner. Overseeing the action is a handsome young Japanese man, Tadashi Sato, who arrives at Taliesin in the fall of 1932 to begin an apprenticeship with Wright, and who is put to work right away -- in the kitchen, peeling vegetables and washing dishes -- and whose storey provides a lens into the strange and tumultuous world of Taliesin at that time, when Wright and Olgivanna held sway not just over matters architectural, but over everything from the apprentices' diets to their clothes to whom they could choose to date or marry. Needless to say, this is fantastic subject matter for a writer as sly and intrepid as Boyle. "The Women" is a sexy, gripping, fabulously entertaining drama about marriage, the bargains that men and women make, and the privilege and twisting of genius and fame, from one of America's most talented and imaginative writers.