A sensual feast of love and art

Nancy Horan's first novel Loving Frank chronicles the long-term love affair between architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his mistress Mamah Borthwick. Based on Wright's autobiography, old newspaper clippings, census reports, and letters from Mamah to Ellen Key, Horan has created a multifaceted portrait of a feminist trailblazer.

At the beginning, Mamah is devoted to the Women's Movement. Holder of a master's degree and fluent in several languages, she is the wife of Edwin Cheney and mother of two children, John and Martha. She is also helping to raise her orphaned niece. Although she has a loving and devoted husband, Mamah feels that she is slowly stifling intellectually.

In 1903, the Cheneys commissioned a prairie house in Oak Park, IL from rising star Frank Lloyd Wright. Over the next several years, Mamah and Frank (who is also married with several children) strike up a deep intellectual friendship that evolves into a passionate love affair, until after a number of setbacks and separations, the two travel to Europe together. However, Mamah's romance is punctuated by the ensuing media scandal and her guilt at destroying two families' lives, including that of her devoted sister Lizzie who had lived with her household and helped to raise her children after she eloped with Frank.

The novel is narrated by Mamah (albeit in the third person). She holds socially forward views on the roles of equality for women, and belongs to the Nineteenth Century Woman's Club founded by Wright's mother Anna. Her newfound relationship with Frank kindles her dormant literary and artistic desires, and she finds herself returning to translating once again.

Her relationship with Frank is a tempestuous one; she is prone to bouts of depression and homesickness for her children (although not her former life), he fails to keep track of accounting, is a compulsive large-ticket shopper, and is deeply in debt. Roughly halfway throughout the novel, Wright fulfills a promise made to Mamah and builds a dream house, Taliesin, in the hills of Wisconsin. The two will share this nature-inspired lodge until the sudden, violent end of their relationship in 1914.

I must admit that, although I've long admired the architectual genius of Frank Lloyd Wright and spent my first four years in Wheaton, Illinois (including occasional car trips through Oak Park), I was unaware of the brutal personal tragedy that ended Frank and Mamah's affair. I was shocked, and quickly looked up an online autobiography of Lloyd Wright, only to discover that it was in fact true.

The descriptions of Frank's artistic ideals on the new American architecture are at times taken from speeches that he gave, along with his autobiography, and I quickly settled into Mamah's and Frank's life together as though I were catching up with an old friend. Horan offers sweeping views of Europe on the brink of change, along with Oak Park society and the rougher mining frontiers in Colorado. Many of her characters are based on actual acquaintances of Mamah, lending the novel an almost autobiographical tone that is at once authentic and believable based on Mamah's well-documented beliefs.

This was a very enjoyable read that reminded me of other recent historical art fiction novels such as The Painted Kiss, and was a real pleasure to read. The only caveat was that the last several chapters discuss the gory aftermath of the Taliesin tragedy in lurid detail to the point of feeling like tabloid articles, so if you're a sensitive reader, consider yourself forewarned.