Loving Frank: A Novel
by Nancy Horan
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Book Summary Information
Author: Nancy HoranEdition: Paperback
Published: 2008-04-08
ISBN: 0345495004
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of Loving Frank: A Novel
Book Review: "It's not good to live so much inside oneself. It's a self-imposed exile"
Summary: 4 Stars
Part love story and part treatese on the social mores of the early twentieth century, Nancy Horan's beautfully rendered Loving Frank is all about the life of Martha "Mamah" Borthwick (1869-1914) and her relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959). Indeed, their affair proved to be be quite scandalous as both of them left their respective spouses to travel through Europe, even settling in Italy for about a year.
Wright was also well known in his lifetime as one of the world's most prominent and influential architects and his colorful personal life frequently made headlines, most notably for the failure of his first marriage and for the terrible 1914 fire that occurred at his Taliesin studio in the hills of Wisconen.
Frank meets Mamah Borthwick for the first time in 1907 when her husband Edwin commissions the archititect to design their home, in Oak Park. For a period after they had built the house, Edwin and Mamah had socialized with both Frank and his wife Catherine, fairly often, perhaps once a month, with Frank's repuation growing considerably since those early days when they'd consulted on the house.
During construction, however, both Mamah and Frank had lost themselves time and again on deep discussion; indeed Frank ignites her mind like no other persion she'd ever met. At first they talk about ideas and then about the great philosophers, gradually beginning to see each other as fellow outsiders. But it is when Mamah finds herself saving up insights to tell Frank, thoughts she never would have shared with her husband, that she realises they'd grown too close.
The shy and diffident Edwin has promised on their wedding day to be Mamah's anchor, but he also threatened her with the comment, "take my love for granted, and I shall do the same for you," and these words ending up being prophetic and a recipe for disaster when Mamah becomes ever more steadily entranced with her knight in shining armour. With "his black cape whipping like a sail then his wide-brimmed hat", he beguiles her with facts art and culture.
For Mamah, Frank represents a break from the mediocrity of her marriage, a man who rides about town in his car named the "yellow devil," called for his devil-may-care attitude about gossip. Frank on the other hand, sees in Mamah a beautful and articulate woman who "comprehended," and who keeps him sharp and is quick with repartee; she quickly becomes putty in his hands as they wordlessly find a common rhythm.
This is a summmer of breathtaking risks for Frank and Mamah, and for every careful plan there is a careless visit. Meeting for trysts in Downtown Chicago at Frank's new office, it frightens her to feel so out of control as he steadily becomes a life force in her life, filling whatever space he occupies with a pulsing energy that is spiritual, and intellectual all at once. When they elope to Europe, they both become caught in an emotional conundrum, he wants to find inspiration for his work, while she is certain that she will have the happiest life imaginable with the one man she loves more than any other she has ever known.
Certainly, Mamah doesn't look back and regret what she and Frank have done together as it was the truest love she'd known with a man, but she's also well aware of the limits society presses on women, especially when she is forced to contront the harsh realities of the choices she made in the form of a divorce from Edwin, the betrayal of her children, and the fact that now, in the eyes of the press, she's a marked woman in the form of a "humiliated harlot."
In this uniquely feminist novel, Horen depicts a woman's incompatible desires for love and motherhood in a society where adultery is unadulteratingly frowned upon and where intimacies with the opposite sex are fraught with difficulties. Considering these restrictions, Frank and Mamah's sojourn is certainly not the spiritual adventure that Frank had conjured up, nor was it what Mamah had imagined when she boarded the train from Oak Park to New York City.
Both, however, are certainly wise and fearless, and as they travel from Berlin to Paris and then onto Florence, both have the sense to realize that there's no turning back even as the press begin to hound them for a story. Only when Mamah meets renowned feminist philospoher Ellen Key does she find a mixture of wisdom and empathy. Employed to translate Key's Swedish texts for the American market, Mamah is gradually awakened to the type of love that joins the spiritual with the erotic and the lurid headlines that have so sickened her seem to recede as she listens to this women who has her deepest instints understood and even championed.
Certainly the journey that Mamah and Frank take on behalf of true love becomes an emotional adventure that opens their hearts to the world. From the counter culture bohemians that Mamah meets while living in Berlin who talk of who is sleeping with whom, of politics, war, and socialism, to the rolling unglaciated hills of Southwestern Wisconsin, where Frank hopes that they won't have to live these fragmented lives anymore, Loving Frank is undeniably a novel of massive range.
While towards the end, the narrative doesn't hold as together as tightly as it should, this novel is still a fascinating study of a deeply misunderstood woman and the man with whom she loved as they try to live out their lives in a world where no obstacle was too great in their quest for romantic and spiritual fulfillment. Mike Leonard September 07.
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