"The Women" Review

This week, I finished reading T.C. Boyle's The Women, a long, fascinating and often-times sordid account of world-famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his wives, mistresses, children and trials and tribulations surrounding his family and professional lives.

While I became totally engrossed in the fictionalized tale, narrated by a Japanese intern who worked for Wright -- the melodrama of Wright's paramours, his financial struggles, his MAMMOTH ego, the tragedy that spills forth near the end -- the whole time I was reading, I found myself longing for a good biography.

Don't get me wrong: I love T.C. Boyle, and think his writing, full of incredibly deep descriptions of people, places, things and events, and the emotional states of so many characters, is excellent. I've read several of his novels, including The Road to Wellville, Drop City, World's End and A Friend of the Earth, and loved, or at least really liked, them all.

I have to say, though, that I think the idea of fictionalizing real people -- as Boyle did of John Kellogg, founder of the Kellogg cereal company, in The Road to Wellville -- while surely challenging and fun in terms of tweaking history, is dangerous because it either a) allows casual readers to believe false history or b) makes people like me seek out biographies.

Of course, I'm only seeking out a non-fiction account of Wright now that I've finished Boyle's book, but others might either be turned off by the book ahead of time, or decide part way through that, hey, Wright was such an incredible talent and personality, maybe I should just read what he was REALLY like.

As such, I've added Meryle Secrest's Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography to my Amazon wish list. I'll buy it elsewhere, however, in order to stick it to Jeff Bezos for his obnoxious Christmas shopping season effort to undermine indie bookstores.

Bottom line, though, is that I heartily recommend Boyle's book.