Loving Frank: A Novel

Product Details

Author : Nancy Horan
Binding : Paperback
EAN : 9780345495006
Edition : Reprint
Number of Pages : 400
Product Group : Book
Publication Date : 2008-04-08
Publisher : Ballantine Books
Release Date : 2008-04-08

ASIN : 0345495004

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Customer Reviews

Tragic Liaison (2007-09-26)

I enjoyed this book for rounding out my sense of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney, who was his lover and sometime soul mate for many years. It's the most pleasant way I know to bring these two powerful people to life in your mind.Most novels deal with romance, hope, and redemption. Loving Frank is quite different because it displays a tragedy based on imagining the relationship between two real people, the famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the wife of one of his clients, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, who left her husband and family to live with Wright. Beyond a few scraps of writing, we know little about Mamah Borthwick Cheney other than what a few friends and the excesses of journalists said about her. Even though I've read several books about Wright, I didn't get much of a sense about Mamah until reading this book. I thought that Nancy Horan did a fine job of bringing Mamah to life by imputing reasonable motives to her for the actions she is known to have taken.Frank Lloyd Wright had a reputation for romancing the wives of his clients, but only Mamah left home and hearth for him . . . despite having a comfortable marriage and two children. Mamah appears to have seen this as an opportunity to become a fulfilled person by having a professional (she was a translator of feminist literature) and a personal life (with Frank) that was continually stimulating.Why, then, is this a tragedy? Well, Mamah didn't end up doing nearly as much professionally as she hoped, and Wright was often not around . . . or not behaving as he should have. In addition, Mamah ended up being characterized by the press as a scarlet woman in a way that shamed all of her family and friends. Her leaving her family affected her children and herself in fundamental ways as well . . . the loss was substantial. Relations with her author were also strained. And her life ended in a tragic way. If you want to know more about the real events, I recommend Death in a Prairie House by William R. Drennan.You can visit Frank Lloyd Wright's home in Oak Park, Illinois as it was constituted in 1909 when he left his family to be with Mamah. Her home is also nearby. In addition, you can tour Taliesin near Spring Green, Wisconsin to help you imagine what their life was like. I have been to all three locations and felt that background helped make the book more real to me.In the end, I found myself wondering what Mamah would have to say about her life if she could be an independent observer. Was it worth it? Should she have chosen some other path?Those who are looking for lots of romance between the two will be disappointed in the book. The scenes where both appear are often more about ideas and culture than they are about the relationship.If you have Frank Lloyd Wright on a pedestal because he was a great architect, this book will help you see his feet of clay.

"It's not good to live so much inside oneself. It's a self-imposed exile" (2007-09-14)

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.

Best Debut novel I have read since "Across the High Lonesome." (2007-08-12)

I gave this Debut effort by Nancy Horan a try because of A life long interest in Frank Lloyd Wright. This ambitious work is a fictional accounting of the life of Mamah Cheney. After being hired by Cheney's husband to design a family home, Wright had a scandalous affair With Mrs. Cheney that wrecked both their marriages. This might seem like the plot of a romance novel, but believe me this book is not a romance novel! Cheney is portrayed as an educated woman struggling with her independence against the conventions of a time period when woman were for bearing children and keeping the home fires burning--to be seen but not heard!Frank and Mamah both leave their respective families to live together and travel the world, then eventually settle in Wisconsin. Wright's bigger than life personality is adequately displayed by the author, but the real story here is Maham who lost much in her quest for self realization and also in perusing her love for Wright. Her life is tragically cut short which makes for a difficult ending, still reading about this amazing woman, who was a head of her time makes for fascinating reading.

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