Loving Frank: A Novel by Nancy Horan Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Loving Frank: A Novel
Book Review: Loving Frank
Summary: 4 Stars
This particular book has been selected by a member of our book club here in Sun Lakes Arizona. Previously I read another book on this same subject. I felt that Nancy Horan was able to convey the feelings of a woman caught up in an affair and falling in love with the well known Frank Lloyd Wright. Mamah Bothwich Cheney was truly torn between her children and the man she loved. Unfortunately the path she chose ended up in tragedy for both her and her children.Book Review: Mamah May-muh Martha!
Summary: 5 Stars
Mamah, May-muh, Martha! She was born at the wrong time and wrong place! She was educated in Ann Arbor Michigan at the turn of the 20th century, had the pedigree of the upright Midwestern railroaders who valued work and honesty, married a decent and loving businessman-gregarious provider, had the tenacious intellect of a sharp librarian-school marm and suffragist-feminist, was a "looker", but she was too crazy in love with a man who would have given her the world but could not. Darn!
Mamah Cheney could have had it all but she was sideswiped by her lust for life on the fastlane, the big ego of Frank Lloyd Wright, the promise of being the polyglot sidekick of Swedish born suffragist Ellen Key, and in the end, she had nothing for herself and her two (three including her orphaned nephew) children who she left behind to find love and fulfillment with the iconic architect.
This fictional account of a love story gone tragically wrong and painful, leaves me reeling with wonder, I cannot help but raise some points that challenge thinking outside the home, domesticity, community, society and even world affairs.
First of all, can a mother really be so wildly in love so as to leave her very young children behind to traipse all over Berlin, Italy and Japan to pursue finding herself and her paramour's budding career? Given that Frank Lloyd Wright was really brilliant (after the fact), was he really worth it? Her marriage to Edwin Cheney was flailing but was she really really that unhappy? She had little Martha with Edwin while she was consorting with Frank! I think it was a case of moral fiber fraying and falling dangerously to an abyss that she couldn't get enough fortitude to figure herself out of.
Granted that it was the zeitgeist of women's emancipation and feminism, the attendant focus on lack of rights to get out of bad marriages, lack of equal pay for men and women, identity issues surrounding motherhood and caring for children, did Mamah really blaze into the forefront to liberate women of all ages for all time? Or did she just end up exonerating herself?
Was her sacrifice worth the cause? Her alliance with Ellen Key's cause was almost a chance event in her search for herself and her raison d'etre for villyfying her home and turning her loved one's lives upside down. The Swedish suffragist had modern ideas about women's morality and new feminist roles, I think Mamah was eagerly quick to translate Key's ideas as seen through her private moral dilemma, adultery. In Berlin, Key was tagged as the "wise fool of the feminist movement", vacillating between being a protector of children and the essence of mothering as a human species-forwarding endeavor versus a woman's fulfilling her happiness through achieving her personhood through being allowed the choices and liberties to propel one's potential. I think Ellen Key was wise, period. In Nancy, France, she had told Mamah to find herself first, without Frank, and pursue her own niche in the world, otherwise Frank will just be another "diversion". It was Mamah who could not find her moral compass and was torn, time and time again between her love for her offspring and her love for Frank and herself. It is a pity that her "soulful" translations of Ellen Key's work coulda-woulda been heard by a bigger audience had she sent it to The Atlantic Monthly and not published with those who were affiliated with Frank Lloyd Wright's folios.
Horan's skill in writing allowed for her characters to be heard, to be seen in both good and bad lights, she allowed all their foibles, their humanity to filter through the puritanical times when society was quick to judge moral turpitude. She allowed her readers to look for understanding and to be compassionate; that her characters were flawed, slaves for higher ideals of truth and beauty and most of all, love. But in being so, they chose paths that were dangerously selfish and hurtful to others.
I will not be quick to say that the tragedy of Mamah's end in Taliesin is divine retribution, but simply a horrific event in the life that already has gone through baptism by fire, a fall from grace that happens when people are just going about their daily lives because people are the way they are, fallen from the very start.
Book Review: Tragic love story
Summary: 3 Stars
I enjoyed this book because I did not know anything about Frank Lloyd Wright, except that he was an architect. This book puts you in his time period. It was sad though, but I guess love stories can be sad.
Book Review: Architecture and Adultery
Summary: 4 Stars
Loving Frank is an unsentimental and nuanced fictionalization of the real-life extramarital affair between well-known architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Horan confronts the moral issues implicated by the affair head-on and with intelligence and objectivity. Mamah and Frank are rich, three-dimensional characters surrounded by many other fully developed characters. Informative descriptions of Wright's architecture and discussions of contemporary feminist ideology are nicely interwoven into the personal narrative. These nonfiction elements support and enrich the narrative without overpowering the primary storyline. The novel concludes shortly after a shocking event. Had this event not actually occurred in real life, it would have been an unsatisfactory ending--a disappointing deux ex machina. Recommended, especially for those readers interested in architecture or feminist theory.Book Review: Was Mamah a romantic heroine, or TSTL?
Summary: 4 Stars
I don't know what Ms. Horan had in mind when writing this book. Is Mamah Borthwick the romantic character implied by the title, or is she the horrible warning of the text?
"Loving Frank" is the cautionary tale of a woman's participation in her own destruction. For the educated, attractive and middleaged housewife Mamah Borthwick Cheney, no doubt snagging the interest of that charismatic genius and master manipulator Frank Lloyd Wright was terribly flattering. Perhaps she imagined (or he said) he saw something in her she didn't see herself. Maybe she saw herself as his inspiration, hoped genius would rub off, or planned to bask in reflected glory (or so he promised). Who knows what the attraction was, but Mamah Borthwick Cheney became neither The Great Man's Muse nor recognized as an artist in her own right. She suffered and died for their relationship, in the most brutal way imaginable.
Many times while reading this book, I found myself wanting to shake Mamah. How gullible she was, how easily led, how selfish, how just plain DUMB! Though a self-described feminist, it's apparent that she used feminism to justify choices she'd already made, abdicating her personal responsibility for what happened to her, and exploiting everyone in her life who cared about her. Even the sojourn at university in Sweden she touted as a period of self-discovery, was the result of being abandoned by Frank Lloyd Wright, who'd gone back to his wife in Chicago--and it wasn't self-discovery so much as it was pining.
She continually tried on the opinions and attitudes of those with stronger wills; at their instigation, and for their purposes, and was used by them. Her tolerance of bad treatment she suffered at the hands of both Frank Lloyd Wright and Ellen Key, and her agony at the consequences of abandoning her family are very painful to read about. I think that had Mamah Borthwick Cheney truly been a feminist who valued herself, her story would have ended far differently.
By the way, this is a well written book. Its only flaw is that it doesn't portray Frank Lloyd Wright in a way that would have us saying, "Wow! No wonder she left her family for him!" instead of "She suffered all this for THAT?" Perhaps we could then view Mamah as romantic martyr, rather than pathetic victim.