Frank Lloyd Wright: 'The Architect of Love'

A novel that sets out to be diligently authentic in its treatment of history may deserve admiration. But it's more impressive when a subject amply documented by historians is transformed into an independent work of the imagination, and we keep reading not because our knowledge of the past is being enhanced but because the fiction earns our attention in its own right, as a verbal adventure that uses historical material without being constrained by it. In the words of Brendan Gill, Wright's biographer, “Even the most sympathetic feats of restoration carry the taint of an embalmment.” Though Gill is referring to the dangers of restoring buildings, his warning elucidates the challenges inherent in “The Women.” Boyle offers a reasonably accurate representation of Wright, who stands as the powerful centripetal force of the novel. Yet Boyle isn't just a restorer. After gathering the information he'll use to get the motor of invention running, he goes on to create an array of indelible characters — eccentrics so absorbed in the expression of their passions that they fail to notice or care when their actions turn destructive.

The most immediately influential character in “The Women” is not Wright; it is the narrator, Tadashi Sato, a (fictional) Japanese architect who has spent several years as one of Wright's apprentices and sets out to compose a biography of his mentor. Tadashi doesn't hide the fact that his view of Wright is limited. In an introductory passage, he explains: “I was a cog in his machine for a certain period, one of many cogs, that and nothing more.” It helps, he says, that he knew other apprentices, along with Wright's third wife and his children. Familiarity, though, doesn't necessarily give him access to the whole truth. At one point he asks about Wright, “But did I know him?” — a question that will resonate through the novel as Tadashi offers his own revealing yet limited account of Wright's romantic entanglements (all of it communicated with the help of his “translator,” one Seamus O'Flaherty, who is also Tadashi's grandson-in-law and pops up now and then in the footnotes to vie with Tadashi as a Nabokovian arbiter of the truth).

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