Flesh blood stone glass and steel blend in an organic epic

"Women", not any which: "THE women", those that have accompanied a lifetime during at their peril the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959). Muses, souls sisters, sex toys, slaves, domestic staff, vampires A little things at the same time, according to the new novel by the King of American fiction, t. c. Boyle. Admirable storyteller, writer knows to capture the lives of major characters to light the contradictions of America. In 2004, he was inspired of a bio of Dr. Kinsley, author in the 1950s of a shock on male sexuality report, to write "The circle of insiders", explosive variation on the taboos of sex. It re-offend with "Women", but taking more recoil with his hero, which appears in hollow, through his love.

The private life of the master of organic architecture it is true of the blessed bread for a novelist: three weddings and a funeral tragic marked sentimental life of this great seducer, feeding the press to scandals throughout his career. Always "border line" in morals - and finance-, Frank Lloyd Wright can whenever reborn from the ashes (literally since his ideal home in Wisconsin, Taliesin, burns repeatedly). But his women-Mistresses (and master women) are for him as a water of life, violent, bitter and sweet, which allows him to invent and to move forward.

Offset biography

T. c. Boyle offer us not only a biography offset of the architect, through his family. Its more subtle connection, encompassing, is to show that the great destinies are the result of meetings - depend on the planets and the stars that inhabit their Galaxy. His novel is not linear, it is written in reverse, into three large parts corresponding each to a woman. Olgivanna, the "laborious", his third and last wife met in 1924; Miriam, the enhanced, the gouged vive, his second wife, met in 1914; and Mamah, romantic feminist, his mistress from 1909 (for which he abandoned his first wife, Kitty). The novelist chooses as Narrator a Japanese student, Tadashi Sato, who would have served apprenticeship at Taliesin in the 1930s; his account, written at the end of his life, is transcribed by his young American son-in-law, a promising writer.

This "trick" narrative is less used to scramble the cards only to establish a distance with the story of the antics of the architect. Tadashi has no taboos of America at the time for sex and observed mi-ahuri, mi-amused the behaviour of his master, also great as unbearable (with partners as with his mistresses). This not quite candid Narrator, become philosopher with time, provides a very caustic portrait of America in the first half of the 20th century. T. c. Boyle uses blessed with asterisks and footnotes to add a supplement of irony.

The architecture is not forgotten. Over pages - bloodshed hot, household scenes, interspersed with of working sessions feverish-, is the presence of more and more strong houses and buildings built by Mr Wright: Oak Park, near Chicago, the Imperial Hotel in Japan, the House of the cascade in Pennsylvania... and Taliesin. Flesh, blood, stone, glass and steel blend in an organic epic. This torrent of life and engineering, this molten lava is too strong to be stopped by a puritanical and (already) procedural America. Frank Lloyd Wright is perhaps a monster, a sexual, emotionally irresponsible obsession; his mistresses are no doubt hysterical, almost insane - Miriam especially - and unconscious, but their body and soul fusion product each time a nuclear fission. Love wild and free scans in the final campaigns of slander, insults, and trials.

Income, but step of passion, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Builder Casanova, ends his life in exclamation point - on a masterpiece: the Museum Guggenheim, spiral infinitely "arty" to seventh heaven.