Loving Frank: A Novel
by Nancy Horan
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Book Summary Information
Author: Nancy HoranEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-04-08
ISBN: 0345495004
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780345495006
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Loving Frank: A Novel
Book Review: A Model of Verisimilitude
Summary: 5 Stars
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 - 1959) is arguably America's greatest architect. This is a sweeping statement but one that the man himself would have been swifter than anyone else to acknowledge. Wright was without a doubt a creative genius in the molding of space to create buildings in which people lived and worked. Wright was also supremely confident about his abilities, never missing an opportunity to promote himself.
Wright was also adept at gathering around him a group of men and women architects who in concert with his ideas, brought about a revolution in how homes were designed in the period immediately following the year 1900. It has taken a hundred years and more for some of these men and women to have been given their due as contributors to what has come to be called the "Prairie School" of architecture. They include such figures as George Grant Elmslie, William Purcell, John van Bergen, William Drummond, Isabel Roberts, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. They called themselves "The Chicago Group".
For most of the twentieth century, architectural historians tended to take Frank Lloyd Wright's own estimation of the development of the prairie style as gospel. In the past twenty years or so, more and more of these architects--men and women--have been studied and appreciated on their own merits. While we may understand that to acknowledge what these other architects did is not to diminish the contributions of Wright, Wright's pattern was to de-emphasize the abilities of those who worked for and near him. This became more pronounced they years progressed, as his fame grew and as these architectural associates faded into obscurity or died off.
Wright reinvented himself at least three times in his long career, which stretched from the late 1880s to the late 1950s. However, just as he was skillful in obscuring many influences of his architectural colleagues, so too, Wright was clever and often disingenuous when speaking or writing about his personal life. So, it is a happy addition to the hundreds of published books on Frank Lloyd Wright to have this historical novel, which stays closer and truer to the facts of the most infamous matter in Wright's life than did Wright, himself.
"Loving Frank" gives an account of the relationship between Wright and the former client who became his mistress, Mamah Borthwick Cheney (1869-1914). It details the circumstances leading up to Mamah's murder, as well as the murder of her two children and other members of celebrated architect Frank Lloyd Wright's household at Taliesin, his sprawling hillside home near Spring Green, Wisconsin.
"Loving Frank" is a work of historical fiction; yet it is a model of verisimilitude. Nancy Horan has researched the facts in the lives of the main characters so completely that she addresses dates, times and places other Wright students have missed. This is especially true of the time that Frank and Mamah spent away from their families on their sojourn in Europe.
"Loving Frank" begins in the home that Wright designed for electrical engineer Edwin Cheney and his wife Mamah Borthwick in 1903. Architecturally speaking, the house is both celebrated and odd, even among Wright's unorthodox residences. Unlike the standard two-and-a-half story turn of the century homes on either side of it, the house is low, and is screened from the street by a brick wall. It appears to be a compact, single story bungalow, under a huge ground hugging hipped roof, but is in fact a large two-story house, with the main rooms on the upper entry level and auxiliary rooms on the lower, ground floor. The Cheney Residence gives the passer by no sense of welcome, no invitation to draw near, no clue as to what might be going on beyond that brick wall. It appears silent and secretive, vaguely Oriental, and thoroughly aloof from the rest of the streetscape. Horan describes it in this way: "It had struck Mamah then that her low-slung house looked as small as a raft beside the steamerlike Victorian next door." (Page 12).
While well-hidden from the public sidewalk, the Cheney house is not hidden from the neighboring houses, which in stately Victorian fashion, tower above it. The author uses this reality to dramatic effect. She begins an account of the physical intimacy between Borthwick and Wright in the Cheney house, on the built-in living room couch by the south corner windows. From there, the neighboring Belknap daughters can see Wright and Borthwick "spooning" as they observe the lovers from a second floor window in their house. Thus begins what Horan calls "a summer of breathtaking risks". (Page 27).
Horan offers an account of Mamah's growing dissatisfaction with conventional marriage and motherhood. These both seem stifling to her. Horan also describes how, at the same time, Wright found himself fin the middle of a full blown midlife crisis. While his practice in the years leading up to 1909 was tremendously successful, he had explored the variations of the prairie style to such an extent that Wright sensed his work was losing freshness, appeal and momentum. Wright was at the same time surrounded by a boisterous family that included Kitty, his wife of 20 years, their six children and, firmly ensconced next door, his ever-present mother Anna Lloyd Jones Wright.
Horan portrays Mamah Borthwick Cheney accurately, as a well-educated, modern woman with wide ranging literary interests, a former librarian and early feminist who admired social activist Jane Addams and anarchist Emma Goldman and who was Wright's intellectual equal. Horan also shows a certain tenderness in Mamah that may have gone unanswered in her personal relationships. It is impossible, however, to miss the fact that Mamah was also self-centered and foolhardy in deciding to cast her lot with Frank Lloyd Wright.
According to press accounts from the time, which Horan utilizes in her portrait of their viewpoints, both Mamah and Wright felt that their relationship was above social mores and beyond conventional laws. Both of their spouses strived to maintain their marriages, refusing to grant divorces. Finally, Wright and Mamah eloped to Europe; abandoning their homes, spouses and children. The facts of Mamah's departure have not been recounted heretofore and the reader will no doubt be aghast at the cavalier attitude she takes toward the safekeeping of her children.
The scandal that ensued made headlines across the nation and brought Wright's American career to a standstill. Horan portrays their time in Europe as one in which Wright prepared an elegant European retrospective of his architecture and Borthwick furthered her interest in the feminist movement through the influence of Swedish feminist Ellen Key (1849-1926), whose work is mostly forgotten except by specialized historians. Horan helps the reader understand Key's philosophy and its appeal to the absconded lovers. While in Europe Mamah not only befriended Key, she also undertook translating several of Key's works into English.
In the period between 1911 and 1914, Wright salvaged his career as best he could. Edwin Cheney divorced Mamah and remarried. Kitty continued to refuse to give Frank a divorce. Upon Mamah's divorce (1911) from Edwin, Frank Lloyd Wright built a love nest for himself and Mamah on Wisconsin family land. He used the cover story that he was building a house for his mother, Anna, and in fact Anna had paid for the land. The land, bought on April 10, 1911, was adjacent to land held by his mother's family, the Lloyd-Joneses. Upon it, Wright began to build himself a new home, which he called "Taliesin" (named for a Welsh warrior whose name means "Shining Brow").
The home was an idyllic showplace typical of Wright's aesthetic, with low hip roofs hovering over an elongated complex of stone and stuccoed structures that combined living quarters for Wright, Mamah and their guests, with a workspace for the architectural draftsmen who were part of Wright's practice. Situated on the brow of the hill, the house had commanding views of the valley below, as well as intimate garden courtyard spaces. It was the talk of the region, as were its occupants, living together but still not married.
The pair might have settled into a lifetime of isolated tranquility had it not been for the as yet unexplained action of a deranged servant who, one noonday, on August 15, 1914, locked all the doors save one, set fire to the house, and systematically murdered Mamah, her two children and others of the Taliesin household. Horan offers a poignant description of this massacre and its aftermath, as both Frank Lloyd Wright and Edwin Cheney made their way on the same train from Chicago to Spring Green to mourn their losses.
It is unfortunate that William R. Drennan's exceptionally fine non-fiction book "Death in a Prairie House" was not available to Horan as she prepared her work; it was published at just about the same time as "Loving Frank". Drennan's analysis of the Taliesin murders is the most thoroughgoing by far, to date, and stands as an excellent companion piece to this novel.
As Horan demonstrates, their self-indulgent affair had a disastrous effect on both Mamah and Wright. Wright would go on to obtain a divorce from Kitty only to wind up ensnared in a ludicrous marriage with the colorful yet psychologically unstable Miriam Noel. Borthwick fared far worse. As a result of her love for Wright she lost much in her quest for self-actualization long before her tragic death. Even her mentor Ellen Key eventually became distant with Mamah because Mamah had deserted her children. One wonders what Mamah might say about the choices she made. One also wonders whether Wright fully understood Mamah's level of devotion for him and how much she gave up because of it.
Nancy Horan's novel is well-researched. Ms. Horan was for many years a resident of Oak Park and her daily walks took her past the Cheney House. Out of the familiarity with the many Wright-designed residences there, she also coaxed the untold but remembered stories about the Wrights the Cheneys and their cultured social set. Horan has delved into the oral tradition and expands upon it in a way that the events are fleshed out with feelings--she has attempted to answer all of the whys of the peculiar decision Wright made to abandoned his wife and six children, running off to Europe with the wife of one of his clients (who left her two children behind, as well). The account of their sojourn in Europe while Wright was preparing a high quality volume of his architectural triumphs tells more than any work heretofore about that period in their lives.
Summary of Loving Frank: A Novel
I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.
In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America?s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney?s profound influence on Wright.
Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan?s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah?s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel?s stunning conclusion.
Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.
Advance praise for Loving Frank:
?Loving Frank is one of those novels that takes over your life. It?s mesmerizing and fascinating?filled with complex characters, deep passions, tactile descriptions of astonishing architecture, and the colorful immediacy of daily life a hundred years ago?all gathered into a story that unfolds with riveting urgency.?
?Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light
?This graceful, assured first novel tells the remarkable story of the long-lived affair between Frank Lloyd Wright, a passionate and impossible figure, and Mamah Cheney, a married woman whom Wright beguiled and led beyond the restraint of convention. It is engrossing, provocative reading.?
??Scott Turow
?It takes great courage to write a novel about historical people, and in particular to give voice to someone as mythic as Frank Lloyd Wright. This beautifully written novel about Mamah Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright?s love affair is vivid and intelligent, unsentimental and compassionate.?
??Jane Hamilton
?I admire this novel, adore this novel, for so many reasons: The intelligence and lyricism of the prose. The attention to period detail. The epic proportions of this most fascinating love story. Mamah Cheney has been in my head and heart and soul since reading this book; I doubt she?ll ever leave.?
?Elizabeth Berg
From the Hardcover edition.
Amazon Significant Seven, August 2007: It's a rare treasure to find a historically imagined novel that is at once fully versed in the facts and unafraid of weaving those truths into a story that dares to explore the unanswered questions. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney's love story is--as many early reviews of Loving Frank have noted--little-known and often dismissed as scandal. In Nancy Horan's skillful hands, however, what you get is two fully realized people, entirely, irrepressibly, in love. Together, Frank and Mamah are a wholly modern portrait, and while you can easily imagine them in the here and now, it's their presence in the world of early 20th century America that shades how authentic and, ultimately, tragic their story is. Mamah's bright, earnest spirit is particularly tender in the context of her time and place, which afforded her little opportunity to realize the intellectual life for which she yearned. Loving Frank is a remarkable literary achievement, tenderly acute and even-handed in even the most heartbreaking moments, and an auspicious debut from a writer to watch. --Anne Bartholomew
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