The Women

Reviews

“Boyle doesn’t just fiddle around with familiar autobiographical material. He inhabits the space of Wright’s life and times with particular boldness…With his rollicking short fiction and with novels…Boyle has been writing his own fascinating, unpredictable, alternately hilarious and terrifying fictional history of utopian longing in America. The Women adds a powerful new chapter to this continuing narrative, and it is Boyle at his best. It is a mesmerizing story of women who invest everything, at great risk, in that mysterious ‘bank of feeling’ named Frank Lloyd Wright.”

“[A] potboiler about the love life of Frank Lloyd Wright…The Women is an altogether manic, occasionally baffling and yet strangely riveting novel…Call it a thinking man’s soap opera…It’s the writing that pulls you through, and it’s the writing that will reward you in the last scene of this altogether predictable and (sometimes deliciously) overwrought novel. Boyle is a marvel at descriptive prose.”

“Boyle’s latest novel…is full of vivid descriptions and turns of phrase that pop with a preternatural precision.”

“Rising and falling in steady rhythm, soothing even when the story unsettles and surprises, Grover Gardner’s voice is a fine instrument. He delivers a stellar rendition of Boyle’s reimagining of Frank Lloyd Wright’s tortured relationships with his wives and lovers…Gardner, a regular prize-winner who’s done more than 650 audiobooks, is familiar to audio listeners, but he strikes new notes, hurdling over difficult names and nimbly skipping from character to character. Readers will be entirely immersed in the hothouse world of the architect and his women.”

“The author is a master storyteller who takes literary license but never loses sight of his subject’s humanity. Narrator Grover Gardner has a deep nasal tone that, remarkably, sounds like an old radio broadcaster’s voice. This fits the mood of the book perfectly since the story takes place in the 1930s. Gardner is adept at employing pauses and emphasis to accentuate Boyle’s prodigious vocabulary.”

“In his latest novel, Boyle returns to a familiar subject, that of a visionary tyrant and the communal society that orbits around him. Here it is famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright and four women who alternately loved and hated him, including scorned and vengeful ex-wives and lovers. Boyle throws in a fictional narrator to filter the events, Japanese-born Tadashi Sato, a Wright apprentice. Gardner displays his award-winning narrating chops with clear enunciation of the somewhat florid prose, precise renderings of various accents, and the ability to change pitch for the women characters. His portrayal of ex-wife Maude Miriam Noel is particularly noteworthy, as he expresses a startling range of complex emotions, from murderous rage to demure haughtiness. Gardner gives a bravura performance in this fascinating fictional look at a man who flouted convention and the women who paid dearly for their involvement with him.”

“Grover Gardner, a Publishers Weekly Narrator of the Year (2005), skillfully voices Boyle’s lauded fictional account of Frank Lloyd Wright, as told through the experiences of four women who loved him. A Library Journal pick for Best Audiobooks of 2009.”

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