The women

by T C Boyle. Viking, 2009.

T C Boyle’s mastery of the short story is at odds with his ability as a novelist. Having raised expectations with his marvellous early novel, Water Music, about the explorer Mungo Park, he has disappointed on several occasions since. The Women is an ambitious portrayal of the women who loved Frank Lloyd Wright, and it’s another frustrating read. Boyle is capable of enviable sentences and description, but there are many paragraphs here which could be struck out without loss. The novel is supposedly told through the recollections of one of Wright’s students, Tadashi, via an Irish American translator, but the various ironical effects achieved by this method are submerged by the suspicion that the author is being a clever-clogs. The characters of the three wives/mistresses of Wright are comprehensively detailed, but are of minor historical interest compared to the architect himself. With the exception of Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, novelists have seldom been up to the challenge of putting themselves in the mind of an architect, and Boyle does little to show how Wright’s genius operated. And call me picky, but would people have fed coins into a jukebox in the early 1930s? Did the term ‘jukebox’ exist then? If you haven’t read Boyle before, I’d suggest looking for a collection of his stories first.

- John.