Loving Frank: A Novel
by Nancy Horan
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Book Reviews of Loving Frank: A Novel
Book Review: Lovely
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a remarkable novel. It reads often like the autobiography of one of its two protagonists, the little known but infamous Mrs. Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Mamah comes across as calm, noble, deeply feeling. She and Frank Lloyd Wright were both geniuses, in their different ways, and as such would seem impossible to write. Horan manages to invoke Wright's genius, exploring his private and personal faults as well as his great accomplishments, yet rarely making him seem just ordinary.
Horan invents several powerful passages of love or complaint about Frank, his lying ways, his hypocritical disdain for the democratic common man, his monstrous indebtedness. Always to be a child, wildly enthusiastic, impulsive, and infectiously creative, was his great gift, and bane. Horan manages that aspect of his personality magnificently. She is less concerned with his architecture, with how he was able to turn a space and a place into beauty, beautiful in clever simplicity and repose, and how Mamah might have contributed.
I felt Horan hewed too closely to the historical record of their relationship, afraid to venture into speculative passions, too concerned with building a "reputation" for the really very little known Mamah. Horan did not expressively create a full depth of emotion, to show how the relationship of Frank and Mamah HAD TO BE. She says so, but falls just short of showing it. Part of this shortcoming is our not getting a good feel for just how talented Mamah was, nor any real idea of how she might have pushed Wright as an artist. Maybe she didn't, but this is supposed to be fiction about a little-known person juxtaposed with a toweringly famous one, where author's license ought to apply. Still, Horan is the first author I've read who makes intuitive good sense of their final tragedy.
Book Review: Facts & fiction
Summary: 3 Stars
This book prompted me to look for a photo album of long ago. Pictures I had taken while touring around Chicago and, of course, they include several buildings/homes by Frank Lloyd Wright. Little did I know, back then, about his personal life. "Loving Frank" was a bit of an eye opener. It is fiction based on true facts. Mr. Lloyd Wright and Mrs. Mamah Cheney, the wife of a client, met and fell in love, eloping in the early 1900s, leaving behind their respective spouses and children. The impact their love story made was quite devastating for them both, and especially for Mamah, branded as an unfit mother, as someone living outside the conventional rules, placing her love for a man before anything else. Naturally Frank had his share of problems too. He had abandoned a wife and six children himself, however his actions were probably more "acceptable" at the time, because he was a man.
The author gives voice to their side of the story and this of course is the fictitious part of the book, although much research into the facts has clearly been done.
Questions arise. Undoubtedly leaving everything behind took some guts, especially at the time, especially for a woman. The author is never judgmental though. I think her reconstruction of the events is quite plausible and she certainly makes the reader visualize the inner quality and beauty of their true love, their intellectual affinity, their remorse and sense of guilt towards their families. It is an engaging love story, ending abruptly several years later. If you still do not know why (that is when facts come into the picture), I shall not spoil it for you.
The book also offers an interesting insight into Mr. Lloyd Wright's work, from a different perspective. Well done to the author.
Book Review: We are what we appreciate
Summary: 5 Stars
Frank Lloyd Wright held that modern ornamentation, circa. 1900, was a burlesque of the beautiful. This is historical fiction. The story of the characters is known by the reader in advance. The question is, what does the writer do with the material. Is it compelling?
Genius carries with it the ability to focus, the ability to enchant. A philanderer will claim his existence is stultifying in order to woo someone. The novelist shows Frank Lloyd Wright exhibiting the above-noted qualities. Wright's knowledge of Japanese art is addressed in the novel.
It is related that Mamah wrote in her diary that it isn't sufficient to be a mother. A strength of the book is the novelist's portrayal of Mamah as possessing consciousness of self. Arguably a character with insight is always more interesting to read about than someone with sheep-like characteristics.
Frank and Mamah, leaving their families, travel in Europe for more than a year. They see Boito's MEFISTOFELE. Mamah is obsessed with Goethe. Reports of Frank and Mamah in the press cause Mamah to feel ashamed. Frank tells her that finding her was like finding a safe place to think again. When Frank returns to the U.S., Mamh moves to Germany for a period. Subsequent events won't be detailed here.
The book sketches the qualities and the character of the lesser known of the two people involved in the great drama, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, effectively. I was interested to learn in the Afterward by the writer that she had lived in Oak Park and geographical proximity gave rise to her interest in Wright's career. The author advises that she had to make a greater effort to find out about Mamah Cheney because there was little about her in the published record.
Book Review: A love story through eyes of the other woman
Summary: 4 Stars
Almost everyone is familiar with the name Frank Lloyd Wright, the famous American architect. Few are familiar with the name Mamah Cheney. Frank and Mamah started an extra-martial affair after Frank was commissioned to build a house for Mamah Cheney and her husband, Edwin. Mamah has long been remembered as a home wrecker. Frank and Mrs Cheney carried on an affair and then dually abandoned their families and ran off to Europe together. Sounds pretty black and white to me, however, Loving Frank attempts to retell the story through the eyes of Mamah Cheney.
I seldom enjoy books about adultery, but Nancy Horan did an exceptional job considering the scant information available on Mrs Cheney. She somehow recreated conversations that probably took place, feelings that must have been felt, and thoughts that probably haunted both Frank and Mamah. Loving Frank introduces a very modern woman who is desperately trying to discover her true identity, regardless of the price she and everyone she loves must pay.
Although the story is told from Mamah's point of view, Mamah is depicted as a very flawed woman. She loves her children, but somehow convinces herself that they are better off without her. Being a mother just isn't enough, not anymore. She yearns for something beyond what her husband, children, and friends can provide. When she meets Frank, they each believe one is the answer to the other's prayers. Soon enough, however, Mamah begins finding flaws in Frank as well.
I felt the book dragged a bit towards the end. It's not exactly a five star book, but it attempts to tell a different side of a story that has long been written in stone. Controversial subject matter. Horrific and tragic ending. Pretty good book.
Book Review: limited book
Summary: 1 Stars
I have been listening to this book on CD and couldn't finish the second of twelve CD's. Mamah's character is one-dimensional and for a woman who is evidently trying to find acknowledgement for her creative sensibilities, is astonishingly mute in her marriage. For example,her husband Edwin initiated giving her owl jewelry and figurines as presents, which she accepts without a word but with internal annoyance. Regardless of what era she's living in, what happened to "Honey,thanks for the owls, but it's not really to my taste-why don't I tell you more about what I would like". The author gives her no voice within her marriage to become closer to Edwin by taking any risk to let him know her. What was so terribly wrong with him? We never get to know. The few examples that are given are bizarre. The few hairs on the top of his head resembled banjo strings. Really? Other metaphors are trite. She and Frank were "spit out by fate" to be together because they were born around the same time.
The author may have been limited by the document-based nature of her fictionalization, which perhaps provides her with little knowledge about Mamah's childhood or personality development, but we are left with a rather passive person who seems to get obsessively attracted to a married man's charisma and creativity. She unhappily has to wait for him to become available,but doesn't seem to try to develop her own creativity. Hardly the story of a woman becoming liberated. It instead presents a woman who is selfishly able to leave children and family behind for a man who is a genius but also has a narcissistic personality disorder. That actually could have been interesting had that been written about with more skill.