Bridgman reviewed Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
Review of 'Loving Frank' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Frank Lloyd Wright designed over a thousand structures and over five hundred of them were built. He described his style as "organic architecture," a concept that hard to grasp. Before reading Loving Frank, you might want to take a look online at some of his work. Don't, however, read about him; it would spoil the main action of this book which, although described as "A Novel" on the cover, is more accurately a historical novel. Nancy Horan clearly did much research in preparation of it.
The main action takes place from 1904 to 1914 (Frank Lloyd Wright was born in 1867 and died age 91 in 1959) and is about him and Mamah (May-muh) Borthwick Cheney, the woman who he left his wife for, as she did her husband and children for him.
There was little left of Cheney's writing for Horan to consult, but she does a good enough …
Frank Lloyd Wright designed over a thousand structures and over five hundred of them were built. He described his style as "organic architecture," a concept that hard to grasp. Before reading Loving Frank, you might want to take a look online at some of his work. Don't, however, read about him; it would spoil the main action of this book which, although described as "A Novel" on the cover, is more accurately a historical novel. Nancy Horan clearly did much research in preparation of it.
The main action takes place from 1904 to 1914 (Frank Lloyd Wright was born in 1867 and died age 91 in 1959) and is about him and Mamah (May-muh) Borthwick Cheney, the woman who he left his wife for, as she did her husband and children for him.
There was little left of Cheney's writing for Horan to consult, but she does a good enough job of getting into her head to have her reflecting on the era and its mores. A passage I liked was Mamah's take on animals and what they know and don't know, which she shares with her children while viewing cranes:
They don't know anything about governments or cooking or newspapers or religion. What they see is water and fields and sky. They don't have words for them like we do. Yet they know them. And they know among themselves all kinds of things that we don't know, things about the wind, and how to find the places along the way that they return to every year. Maybe they have a language we know nothing about. Their experience of this planet is completely different from ours, but it's just as real.
This book would be especially liked by those who like E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime. By the way, look carefully at the cover of the edition I read. Can you see the woman's face? It's easy to see here in its postage-stamp size, but not so easy when full sized.
