September 24, 2009: Page Turners 7 p.m.

Book: Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

Discussion:

We had three new members join us this month for our discussion of Loving Frank, Nancy Horan’s biographical novel of Frank Lloyd Wright and his mistress Mamah Borthwick. I expected a really animated discussion this month, as this selection received the highest number of votes when we chose the 2009 reading list, and I was not disappointed. At one point we had four different discussions going on simultaneously. I had trouble keeping up my notes!

Almost all the group members enjoyed the book, eleven voted thumbs up, one gave it a thumbs down, two voted sideways, and one member abstained from voting. The group member who voted thumbs down mentioned that she did so out of concern for the accuracy of the book. Apparently, Horan revealed in her Writer’s Note that she obtained her factual information from newspapers, census reports, scant information in Wright’s autobiography, and from ten letters Borthwick wrote to Ellen Key. Having just read Thunderstruck, a non-fiction work containing a plethora of historical notes, our fellow group mate expected a little more from this book. We did remind ourselves that unlike Thunderstruck, Loving Frank is a work of fiction, and whenever we discussed the personalities of Wright and Borthwick we kept in mind that this was how Horan believed they thought, felt, and acted, and not necessarily exactly how they behaved.

Aside from this question of accuracy, we were able to sum up the book with one word: shocking. The affair between Wright and Borthwick was scandalous during its time, as evidenced by the newspaper attacks Horan mentioned in the book. Some of us also found the manner of Borthwick’s death at the end of the novel shocking, having no previous knowledge of the crime and its particularly violent nature. Others were quite shocked by Borthwick’s abandonment of her children. In order to live with Frank Lloyd Wright, she knew she would have to give up custody of her son and daughter, even after her divorce from Edwin Cheney. Many mothers in the group said that was a decision they could never make themselves, and one remarked that she had trouble separating her own feelings from what she was reading.

From this point we segued into discussions of some of the secondary characters. I remarked that I liked Edwin Cheney better than either his ex-wife or Wright. It may be the writing or the characters themselves, but I never felt like I connected to either one of the protagonists. Another member said she felt the same way, caring for neither Wright nor Borthwick, but that she still enjoyed the book. Edwin Cheney provided a good life for his family, let Borthwick make up her own mind whether or not to stay in Oak Park, allowed Borthwick’s sister to continue living with him and the children afterwards, and even gave Borthwick summers with the children after their divorce. One group member suggested that Borthwick was having a midlife crisis when she met and began her affair with Wright. She also thought Borthwick was dazzled by Wright’s artistic genius. Cheney was an engineer himself, certainly not lacking in intelligence, so I wondered whether it had to be Frank Lloyd Wright, or would Borthwick have fallen for any genius-artist type that crossed paths with her at that time.

Ellen Key, the Swedish feminist whose works Borthwick was translating, was another minor character we discussed. One member brought up the fact that at the beginning of their correspondence Ellen seemed to be encouraging Borthwick in her affair with Wright, arguing that women should be free to love outside the bonds of marriage. However, she later seemed to recant that and suggest that Borthwick should return to her husband. This, combined with her agreement to make Borthwick her American translator and Borthwick’s eventual discovery that Key extended the same rights to someone else, makes Ellen Key seem like a dubious character, one who may not have had Borthwick’s best interests at heart.

While discussing the novel’s characterization we revisited a concept we explored last month: genius. In Thunderstruck we met two characters we dubbed dumb-geniuses. In Loving Frank we found that genius and sociability do not always go hand-in-hand. Frank Lloyd Wright, undoubtedly a genius, rarely paid his bills, and often said those who worked for him received the privilege of being a part of his work in lieu of money. Some members seemed to find this acceptable, while others cursed Wright’s name stating that he might have been a great architect but not a very good man.

Throughout the discussion, we passed around articles and pictures of Wright’s houses and buildings. We also collected voting ballots for next year’s reading list, and I hope to have the results available soon. Flyers for upcoming programming and copies of next month’s selection, How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill, were also distributed.