For days the ruins smoldered, a thin stench of incineration hanging on the air, a sour smell, as if it were a thousand barrels of vinegar that had gone up and not the heart and soul of the place she’d come to love as if she’d built it herself. That smell would haunt her as she lay beside Frank in the too-narrow bed in the guest quarters, everything shifted now to accommodate the new life, the building life, the night fast with the density of darkness absolute and the blankets binding like tourniquets, and she would drift off to the sourness and awaken to it in the first light of dawn. Even the smell of the morning’s bacon rising out of the confines of the temporary kitchen was overwhelmed by it, the sweetness of the turned earth spoiled, the flowers driven down. She felt sick in the mornings now, sicker than she’d been with Svetlana, but she forced herself out of bed and into the kitchen to negotiate the space with Mrs. Taggertz and make good and certain that Frank’s breakfast was delivered to him in the studio because now more than ever he had to keep up his strength.
This, and many paragraphs like it, and the title, The Women, would make one think that the protagonists and narrators of this novel are the women who circled around this man named Frank, the famous Frank Lloyd Wright. But they are not. Instead of speaking in their voices -- something I think would have made the novel far more interesting -- Boyle decides to drape the narrative in confusing and successive layers of maleness.
In the Introduction to Part One we are introduced to the real narrator of the text we are reading -- a (fictional?) Japanese student of Wright’s named Tadashi Sato, who is laying out this manuscript in an attempt to outline the contours of Wright’s genius and the effect it had (necessarily?) on the women in his life. But Sato is not the only voice we will need to contend with.
There will be complaints, of course -- I can foresee that. This is an imperfect process, what with the interposition of the years, the vagaries of memory, the re-creation of scenes the accuracy of which no one now living can affirm or deny. And too, I’ve had to rely on my co-author and translator (the young Irish American Seamus O’Flaherty, who is husband to my granddaughter, Noriko, and whose as yet unpublished translations of Fukazawa and Shimizu are, I understand, quite novel), many of whose locutions seem, I must confess, rather odd in the final analysis.
Are you following that? This is, evidently, a document written in Japanese by one man, and translated into English by another, with, as we will come to discover, both the author and the translator popping up regularly in a series of footnotes and commentaries as the story unfolds.
And -- on top of that -- the story is told in reverse, with each part taking us backward in time to an earlier and earlier relationship of Wright’s.
It leaves one thinking constantly: What on earth is Boyle trying to accomplish with this? Why hide these women behind some many layers?
From the Introduction to Part Two:
In closing, I should mention that my distinguished collaborator, Seamus O’Flaherty, is, in addition to the aforementioned translations, the author of two novels, The Ladies’ Heat (not what you might think -- its subject is women’s track and field, and Kit and Caboodle (also a surprise -- this work deals with a fictional detective agency established in Okinawa by two Englishmen, Jonas Kit and Malcolm Caboodle, in the years immediately following the conclusion of the second war). At this point, sadly, neither has found a publisher. And yet, as I’m sure you’ll agree, O’Flaherty-San brings a unique artistic perspective to the text here as it unravels backward in time to attempt to define the true essence of Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, Wrieto-San, Wrieto-San, banzai! -- the guiding light and enduring genius of all working architects, past, present and future.
Here Boyle is just taunting the reader. Are we too stupid to realize that this is not really a novel about Frank Lloyd Wright, nor even a novel about its purported premise: “Was [Wright] the wounded genius or the philanderer and sociopath who abused the trust of practically everyone he knew, especially the women, especially them?” Given many of the reviews I read online about the novel, I would wager that the answer is yes, as most of those try to approach the work as some kind of biography of Wright or some kind of analysis of his genius.
In Part Three Sato comments in a footnote about Daisy Hartnett, a woman he falls in love with and whom Wright eventually banishes from their community at Taliesin, reading a work by Swedish writer Ellen Key.
This is a feminist text, a gloss on Ibsen and his female characters. Women, Ibsen felt -- certain liberated women, at any rate -- were less regimented by society and more a natural force than men. Of course, while we make no claims here to be feminists or sociologists or anything of the like, I can say that Daisy Hartnett was certainly a natural force, and I too much constrained by expectation -- and by Wrieto-San -- to fully grasp it. Oh Daisy. Daisy, Daisy, Daisy. Where are your creamy white thighs and your butterfly mouth now?
And then, a few paragraphs later, oddly, impossibly it seems to me, from Daisy’s point of view:
The world was in desperate need of Ellen Key -- not simply these pigheaded farmers and their prudish wives, but the world at large. People -- women, especially -- absolutely must learn to think for themselves instead of blindly following the dictates of a patriarchal society that would deny them not only the right to vote but the right to love in their own instinctual way. She had a fleeting fantasy of herself as a sort of Joan of Arc of erotoplastics, wielding a radiant sword and cutting them all down to size, and then, though she was exhausted and the house was as cold as an igloo, she turned back to the book in her lap and there it was, right before her, in Ellen Key’s native tongue: till alska, to love. To love. There was no higher purpose in life, no greater duty -- why couldn’t they understand that?
Indeed. Why can’t they? Sato. Wright. His worshippers. The patriarchal worshippers of genius. Why can’t any of them understand?
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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