The Women & Loving Frank

Thoughts on Words by Andi Gregory Pearson

If all you know about Frank Lloyd Wright is striking architecture, then you’re missing a big part of his story. Architecture was indeed his passion and his designs will live forever. But Wright’s love life created just as much talk as Fallingwater did; his energies were spent as much on three wives and several lovers as they were in designing Taliesin.

Born Frank Lincoln Wright, he changed his middle name to Lloyd to reflect the Welsh heritage of his mother, a member of the Lloyd Jones family of Wisconsin. His father was a handsome, irresponsible music teacher, part time lawyer and itinerate minister who left the family when Frank was 14. Frank’s mother was a strong woman who hung drawings of cathedrals above his crib and took full responsibility for his architecture talent. At age 23, Frank married Catherine Tobin and together they had six children, including a son Lincoln who later invented the children’s toy Lincoln Logs.

“Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility; I chose arrogance,” Frank often said. He was passionate about everything he did including, according to reports, noticing attractive women wherever he went.

This of course, is the basis for TC Boyle’s The Women. Boyle’s energetic, swirling style in writing the historically fiction book could be purposeful, a reflection not only of Wright’s boundless energy but also of the youth and energy of the narrator, Tadashi Sato of Japan who comes to study under Wright. Tadashi arrives and immediately is struck by the beauty and confidence of Olga “Olgivanna” Hinzenberg who was Wright’s third and surviving wife. From rebuilding Taliesin after two tragic fires to trips to Japan to collect rare prints, the story is told through the eyes of the apprentice/student whose father pays tuition at the school of architecture. Nothing escapes Tadashi’s eye – not the small red square Wright uses as a signature motif, the beauty of the surrounding countryside or Wright’s eye for detail when he rearranges decorative items. The story jumps back in time to discuss Maude Miriam Noel, the second wife, whom Wright married after a horrifying death of his lover of ten years, Martha “Mamah” Borthwick Cheney. The book’s pace and excitement never disappoint.

Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank focuses on Mamah who met the eccentric Frank when in 1903, he designed the Cheney’s Chicago house. The smooth, even, unexcitable pace of the book gives the reader the sense that Mamah was calm on the surface yet conflicted and seriously introspective. She was an educated woman who spoke several languages and translated writings of Swedish feminist writer Ellen Key. His wife Catherine would not grant Frank a divorce yet he and Mamah were committed to each other, defying the conventional marriage roles of the time by openly living together to the dismay of the locals in the Taliesin area and according to newspaper reports at the time, causing a scandal that rocked Chicago society. Mamah and her children, who were visiting Taliesin, perished in a fire set by the butler, a man from Barbados. Because he died in prison just two weeks after the tragedy, no one knows his motivation for the arson and murder. Horan’s book is gently written and understated and yet gives the reader a deep understanding of the inner lives of the love-torn principles.

If you’re a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, and who isn’t, reading both or either of these books will give you a glimpse into the heart of this complex and unforgettable character and the women he loved.

Andi Gregory Pearson is an avid reader and belongs to three book clubs. She lives in Golden.

Olive Kitteridge

Thoughts on Words by Andi Gregory Pearson


Olive Kitteridge - Daily Life Becomes Prize Winning Literature

     There is hue and outcry right now in the literary community because the Publisher’s Weekly top ten Best Books of 2009 is a list of contemporary fiction works by male authors only.  Many readers and writers are concerned that the list compilers have made a mistake by omitting women writers (although it should be noted that Heather McHugh is on the list for best poetry works).  While it may be true that more emphasis should be focused on outstanding women writers like Alice Monroe who won the Man Booker International Prize for her short stories, my response to that concern is two words – Pulitzer Prize. 
    The Pulitzer Prize for Literature 2009 went to Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.  We can be as dismissive and cavalier as we want to be about awards and honors but the Pulitzer Prize is a big deal.  And for my money, Strout earned it the old fashioned way - by being a brilliant observer of life and by writing a deep, messy, textured word portrait not only of the title character but of a small Maine town and its colorful population.  “Town is the church, and the grange hall, and the grocery store, and these days, the grocery store could use a coat of paint.”  The town may seem quiet, even boring, but the characters are alive, profound and show us the complicated nature of human life and love.
     I found it ironic that Olive’s initials are OK when it is clear that for most of the book, she is not ok.  Olive’s story is not a flashy one but rather one of everyday life in a community where each person’s story is known to others.  Olive and her pharmacist husband Henry have lived in town for a long time.  They built a house, raised a son and Olive taught math to seventh graders.  The fact that she never treated the children to a kind word probably accounts for their terror when they see her in the grocery store.  Even when they are adults and she is retired, they cannot bring themselves to call her by her first name.  Olive is not much kinder to her only son nor to her long-suffering husband, Henry. When he wants to know if it’s too much to expect her to accompany him to church, she replies, “Yes, it most certainly is too &*%# much to ask!”  We wonder how her husband can love her or how the reader can even like her.  Olive is brusque, unpleasant and self righteous and chances are good that we each know someone just like her.  As her life progresses, does she develop compassion or just adapt to situations to get what she wants out of life?  Is her emotion bottled up making this a story of longing or is she merely self centered and demanding? 
          Tangential to Olive are the other lives and stories in the town.  Strout has written the book in thirteen chapters, each a short story brilliantly woven and displayed.  We meet, among others, the cocktail lounge piano player, the grocer’s wife and the couple whose son is in prison.  “All these lives,” one character says, “all the stories we never know.”  But we do know them and we know individuals of Crosby, Maine, possibly better than we know our next door neighbors.  
    Complex relationships, powerful and life changing events, serious inner conflict and personal, daily life are all beautifully written about in Olive Kitteridge.  No wonder this book and its female author won one of the most prestigious awards in literature.

    

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

The Lacuna is the first Barbara Kingsolver novel published in nine years and her fans who appreciate her rich and vivid language will not be disappointed. Told as a posthumous memoir in a series of journals of Harrison William Shepherd the son of a Mexican mother and American father and chronicles his life beginning as a boy growing to manhood in Mexico. Life with his mother is tenuous and as Harrison moves with her from the remote and beautiful Isla Pixol to Mexico City, growing from boy to man, his haphazard upbringing and education consists of whatever he is able to glean from the various hired help who put him to work.

It is Shepherd’s early experience in the kitchen that is the unlikely catalyst that brings him into the lives of none other than the great Mexican muralist and political socialist Diego Rivera. Through Rivera he works for and becomes friends with Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky, the exiled Communist leader who is living with the two artists. It is these experiences that help him solidify his principles about humanity: adulthood, politics, sexuality, and literature and art.

After the violent assassination of Trotsky a traumatized and frightened Shepherd flees for America in the midst of a torrent of very public accusations and turmoil swirling around Rivera and people associated with him. Shepherd arrives on the east coast of the United States, just after the end of WWII and the anti-communist furor was building. He brings with him his writing and his love of Mexican history and culture.

He reinvents himself in Asheville, North Carolina as a reclusive writer of historical romances set in Mexico. His debut novel is received to popular acclaim and Shepherd attracts the attention of American readers and, later, bureaucrats within the House Un-American Activities Committee, who begin to piece together their own version of who they think Harrison William Shepherd is.

The Lacuna is a smooth, well-written book that can be enjoyed merely for its thoroughly absorbing story but it is a novel that can hold its own for a more in depth read. True to much of Kingsolver’s fiction, she has conducted considerable research for her novel: of the time, from 1920’s to 1951 in two countries’ culture and politics, and in the characters, Kahlo, Rivera, and Trotsky giving dimension to an already intriguing real-life story. Throughout the story, as told in Shepherd’s diaries and compiled by Shepherd’s loyal Ashville secretary, Kingsolver explores themes from the multiple meanings of ‘lacuna’: a gap or missing part as in a manuscript, an underwater cave. She intertwines her trove of information with expansive artistic freedom, to making unspoken connections with historical events of the politics in the United States to more current political events of today that are impossible to ignore. As with many of her tales Kingsolver takes advantage of the power fiction can wield to speak truths that nonfiction media too often remain silent to.

Review posted by: Amanda Clarke