The Women

I've been away from my reading blog due to a crazy busy schedule and also because something in EOU's move to gmail messed up my ability to connect to my blog. I think everything is fixed, and teaching ENGL 104 again this summer gives me an excuse to catch up.


I plan to write about a number of books I read this past year. The first is a book by T. C. Boyle called The Women. I have read a book by Boyle in the past, which was a humorous look at minor environmental terrorists. I remember someone living in a tree and characters attacking logging equipment. The Women is nothing like that book.


The Women retells the story of the lives of three women who loved famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Olgivanna Milanoff, Maude Miriam Noel, and Mamah Cheney. The book addresses each woman's story in turn in that order. Olgivanna was Wright's last wife, Mirim his second, and Mamah a tragic love affair while he was married to his first wife Kitty, so the book tells the women's stories in reverse chronological order. I think this order allows the story to climax (spoiler alert!) with the murder of Mamah and her children at Wright's Wisconsin home, Taliesin, which is very effective. The narrative deftly captures the different personality of each woman and her intersection with Wright's life. The focus on the women gives them the power of perspective over the reader's interpretation of Wright, which is a refreshing approach.

The book is narrated by a Japanese apprentice, Sato Tadashi, which is an interesting technique. It gives the narrator an insider perspective without using the first-person perspective for any of the main characters, which perhaps avoids biasing the reader in favor of any of them. The narrator doesn't interfere much in the story except for some rather humorous footnotes and the introductions to each of the three sections. In the introduction to the third section, Tadashi visits Taliesin with his wife, and Wright meets him at the station. Tadashi is weeping from "joy, recollection, nostalgia, pain" and is deeply honored by the fact that Wright respects apprentices well enough to take time to meet him (326). Tadashi's awe of Wright echoes the experience of the women in depicting Wright's charisma. Despite his ambition, arrogance, and insensitivity, Wright was a powerful, fascinating, and charming man, whom individuals might love or hate but couldn't help admire.

At the time I was reading this book, I also watched a PBS documentary by Ken Burns called Frank Lloyd Wright. The documentary told the story of Wright's plans for his famous house Fallingwater in Pennsylvania. Always needing money, Wright took the contract for Fallingwater and then went back to work on other projects. When finally the future owner wished to see his plans, the owner called to say he had arrived at the station and would get to Taliesin in an hour or two. Wright spent those hours drafting freehand from the work he had been doing mentally all along and was ready to meet the owner as if he'd been working on the plans for months. That story seems representative of many qualities of Wright: again, his arrogance, partly also his insensitivity to the needs of others, and finally most definitely his impossible genius.

I also watched a documentary on the renovation of Heurtley House in Chicago called The Restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's Heurtley House, which was a really interesting way to explore Wright's design by tracking the ongoing attempt to revive the house's original qualities.

My interest in this book arises from the fact that my dad, architect George T. Knowles, was apprenticed to Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1950s, toward the end of Wright's life. My dad lived at Taliesin East in Wisconsin and also at Taliesin West near Scottsdale, AZ, so he knew Wright and his family. My dad is working on a book of photos about his experiences at Taliesin and has many funny stories about the celebrities who used to visit. Because Boyle lives in a home designed by Wright in Santa Barbara, my dad has attempted to contact him to see whether he might tour the home, but he has met with no success.

As a child, I visited a number of Wright buildings, including Taliesin West, Fallingwater, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Beth Sholom Synagogue in Pennsylvania.

Works Cited


Boyle, T. C. The Women. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.
Burns, Ken and Lynn Novick. Frank Lloyd Wright. Florentine Films, 1998.
Restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's Heurtley House. Perf. H. Allen Brooks. 2002.
"The Women" [cover image]. Penguin. 2011. Web. 26 June 2011. us.penguingroup.com