I find T.C. Boyle less than thrilling

The Women **1/2
by T.C. Boyle

T.C. Boyle is better when he's writing straight fiction than biographical fiction. Compare, for example, the mesmerizingly wonderful "Drop City" to the mesmerizingly dreadful "The Inner Circle," a repugnant and splenetic look at the work of sex research meister Alfred Kinsey.

Boyle seems to enjoy writing about famous people with whom he has some sort of ax to grind--Kinsey, Kellogg-- and so it goes with "The Women," billed as a biography of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, but, in reality, is a biography of the four women in his life. Wright himself is almost absent from this treatment. I learned, for example, that Wright liked to use soft pencils, eat plain food, had a domineering mother, and had a sense of entitlement such that he rarely paid his bills. In short, Boyle dismisses Wright as an an arrogant mama's boy, an essentially small-town guy with pretensions about his Welsh heritage (an interesting treatment from an author from a small town who changed his own middle name from plain old "John" to "Coraghessan" when he was 17).

The frame for the story is klunky and somewhat incredible; the narrator is a Japanese protege of Wright's, now an architect in his own right, writing a biography with footnotes from the memories of a colleague who worked at Taliesen with him. Fine, as far as it goes, but the point of view of the story is largely omniscient, and it seems unlikely that either the protege or his colleague would have such intimate knowledge of the inner thoughts of Wright's household members.

*** SPOILER*** The plotting of the story is equally klunky; it's told in reverse chronological order. In theory that makes sense because it allows events to lead back to the murder of Wright's lover, Mamah Cheney, and the burning of Taliesen I by a crazy butler, the most dramatic event in the book. But in telling the story backward, Boyle has to give away a good deal of what's about to happen.

Still, this is Boyle, whose passion and fluidity of language can make up for a lot of other drawbacks. One only wonders why he squandered the chance to "Kellog-ify" Wright and opted instead to write about the women.