Loving Frank by Nancy Horan Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Loving Frank
Book Review: "It is not sufficient to be a mother: an oyster can be a mother."
Summary: 4 Stars
In her mesmerizing debut novel, LOVING FRANK, Nancy Horan illuminates the relationship between Mamah Borthwick Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright and most especially the five years from 1909 to 1914, the years the couple spent living together. Although much is known about Frank Lloyd Wright, until LOVING FRANK was published, not much was known about Mamah at all.
Mamah, who may or may not have been the great love of Frank Lloyd Wright's life, met the visionary architect in 1903 or thereabouts, when her then-husband, Edwin Cheney, engaged Wright to build a new home for his family in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. Mamah and Wright were attracted to each other instantly, though it was certainly the wrong time for either to fall in love, since both were already married, with children.
And Mamah did resist Wright, at least in part, until 1909, when she could resist no longer. In a truly heartbreaking set piece set in the Colorado home of a good friend, who was, herself, recovering from a difficult childbirth, Mamah Cheney very effectively deserts both her husband and her young children and sails for Europe with Wright who in turn, has deserted his wife and children.
The trans-Atlantic voyage marks the beginning of five turbulent years together for Mamah and Wright. A divorce would come easy to one of them, for the other it would be very difficult, and with good reason. And both Mamah and Wright would learn that society could be very cruel and unforgiving regarding those who refused to play by its rules.
I found LOVING FRANK to be an engrossing book, but I couldn't bring myself to really care about either of its main characters, though Horan does a fine job in giving us both their good and not-so-good points, and we come to see that both are complex and complicated people. I, personally, felt that Horan empathized greatly with Mamah, and she seems to be trying to make us do so as well, but for me, it was simply impossible. While I found Mamah's story fascinating, and I sympathized greatly with her ultimate destiny, it's hard-to-impossible for me to empathize with a mother who willingly left her tearful and heartbroken six-year-old son for a romantic interlude. To make matters even worse, Mamah tries to lay all her troubles on the doorstep of Catherine Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright's wife.
But that's the amazing thing about LOVING FRANK. Despite the fact that I heartily disliked both protagonists, despite the fact that I knew how this story was going to end, I still couldn't put the book down. I spent an entire Saturday afternoon and evening, when I should have been doing other things, reading a fictionalized account of a love affair whose outcome I had known for years. And if that isn't a testament to the power of Horan's ability to tell a story, I don't know what is.
Despite my praise, I didn't find LOVING FRANK perfect. Horan does write very intelligently, and at times, very elegantly, and she does let Frank and Mamah tell their own story, but her style is quite journalistic, and when she seeks to describe the romantic feelings between Frank and Mamah she slips into overwrought idealism. This is even more jarring when one considers the fact that neither Frank nor Mamah, by all accounts, were terribly romantic persons, and probably neither believed in the idea of a "soul mate." While I couldn't really like either Mamah or Wright, I did find myself very much in sympathy with Edwin Cheney. In the end, he's the character who acted most selflessly, and sadly, the character who lost the most.
I'm not completely impervious to the sadness that marked Mamah's life, and the ending of the book will shock and sadden anyone who isn't already familiar with the real life happenings. One would have to be heartless for it to not. However, in the end, I was left, not so much with a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, but with the image of a little six-year-old boy, wandering the streets of Colorado, searching for his mother, a mother who was gallivanting around Europe, a mother who chose her lover and her job as a translator over her small son. That, more than anything, tugged at my heartstrings and brought a tear to my eye, and is what I'll never forget.
Book Review: Loving Frank
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a wonderful work for a first novel. The author follows the basic history of Frank Lloyd Wright's life using her enlightened imagination to fill in the gaps with stunning success. Her characters are very well drawn and the action flows.Book Review: Loving Frank
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the best books I have ever read. Middle was a little slow but don't stop. I highly recommend this to anywone Book Review: A Great Read!
Summary: 4 Stars
I couldn't put the book down once I started reading it. Nancy Horan managed to create a transporting drama without being overly dramatic about it. Beautifully and delicately written. Book Review: Love, Architecture and Tragedy Feed Into an Involving Pre-WWI Romance
Summary: 5 Stars
Not only has the work of architect Frank Lloyd Wright been the subject of intense scrutiny but also his colorful personal life, in particular, the failure of his first two marriages and the deliberate acts of arson and murder at his Taliesin studio in 1914. First-time novelist Nancy Horan has captured just one extended episode in Wright's long, checkered life and written a terrifically engaging piece of historical fiction. Set in the years before World War I, it is fundamentally a love story between the married Wright and the wife of a client for whom he was designing one of his signature prairie houses in Oak Park. The woman was a real figure long forgotten, and her name was Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Their affair scandalized Chicago society, as both abruptly left their spouses and children in 1909 to live in Europe together. She more than he faced the judgment of an unforgiving public, and in response, she was racked with guilt. The irony is that Mamah's husband Edwin Cheney fully accepted the situation and granted her a divorce with unencumbered access to their children.
Wright, on the other hand, faced resistance from his wife Catherine who adamantly refused to divorce him. Horan handles all this potentially sensationalistic material with a minimum of melodramatic flourish, and the story evolves into the personal journey of a couple who realize they have reached a point of no return. Their co-existence becomes so insulated from the outside world that they start to view themselves as idealists who rationalize their illicit actions through dedication to their individual endeavors. Wright's career, as we all know, continues to thrive thanks to his innate brilliance, while Mamah finds the precursor to a life coach in Swedish suffragist Ellen Key. Key's proto-feminist rhetoric about the constrictions of marriage sparks Mamah to embrace her mentor's singular belief that true love trumps quotidian obligation. The couple eventually returns to America where Wright builds his famous summer home in Wisconsin, Taliesin, in the hope of shielding themselves from censure. This is where Horan lets the drama of the actual events unfold and propel the narrative.
It turns out that Key influenced Taliesin and also went through a personal transformation that allowed her to reverse her steadfast position and become a champion of motherhood. As the more elliptical figure, Mamah undergoes her own personal metamorphosis, which feels surprisingly contemporary in that author's approach. Without conveying any of her own personal judgment, Horan dares to expose a woman who made the socially unacceptable decision of allowing her self-expression take priority over her obligations as a mother. The problem Key tried to articulate in her philosophy could not be realized by Mamah without a major sacrifice, and there hasn't been that significant change in thinking a century later. Above all else, Horan is able to provide human dimension to the relationship between the lovers that touches on their own passions with unforced ease. Her book may not have the scope of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime or even Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, two panoramic pieces of historical fiction set at the beginning of the 20th century, but I think she matches them in the vividness of the detail presented and in the immediacy of the characters' emotions.