A ruminative, unsettling look at the many faces of Frank Lloyd Wright
Architect, philanderer, maniac, tyrant: the many faces of Frank Lloyd Wright provide an intriguing foundation for TC Boyle’s twelfth novel. The Women explores the many sides of the Prairie School doyen as seen through the lens of his entanglements with four women — Kitty, Miriam, Olgivanna and Mamah — and their generally torrid fallout.

Never mind the title, Wright is the main attraction: arrogant, suave, devoted to the inscrutable logic of intimacy on the one hand and a singular work ethic on the other. The novel’s geographic scope is impressive, steadily dilating as admirers and underlings enter his life.

Boyle’s long, syncopated sentences are loaded with proper nouns, his mercilessly precise scenes the product of a fussy structural agenda. Framing schemes abound throughout the novel, as does a commitment to historical detail. Fittingly, Boyle’s prose has a spatial, structural, almost architectural< sensibility. The story’s pacing is at times puzzlingly slow, but what it sacrifices in economy it makes up for in descriptive heft. Grover Gardner’s appealing narration deftly interprets the novel’s chameleonic protagonist.

The Women remains, in many ways, an unsettling story, a knot of impacted emotions and their untoward eruption. The women themselves mostly suffer, and Wright looms large as can be — a puppeteer whose instrumentalist views on life and love rumble beneath his every move.