Short Takes
Frank Lloyd Wright
By Ada Louise HuxtableViking, 251 pp., $19.95
The main challenge facing the eminent architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable in this biography of Frank Lloyd Wright for the Penguin Lives series is to think of something new to say. Wright's sustained genius over a long career, and the melodramatic, even bizarre facts of his personal (never ''private") life, have given birth to a vast and growing library of Wrightiana.
Huxtable gamely takes it all on -- not just Wright's architecture but the marriages, scandalous liaisons, and tragedies, the insouciant approach to financial proprieties (what she calls his ''leveraged lifestyle"), the ''lost" period when he built little but his own legend. And that takes us only to his middle years. The latter part of the book is where Huxtable's descriptive powers really come alive, perhaps because here her own biography starts to intersect with Wright's, or simply because she finds his later work, beginning with Fallingwater in the 1930s, more inspiring.
Frank Lloyd Wright as she portrays him was brilliant, irascible, his own best myth-maker. Defying the truism that there are no second acts, Wright's life had a first, second, and third act and even an epilogue, the completion of the visionary Guggenheim Museum after his death at 92, although he admitted with characteristic vanity only to a youthful 90.
Human Capital
By Stephen Amidon
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 375 pp., $24
In this richly textured novel, Stephen Amidon hands down a powerful indictment of the way we live now. His judicial eye falls on the fictitious Connecticut suburb of Old Totten, on three households, and particularly the men who head them: Quint Manning, a Wall Street Midas sitting atop a dodgy hedge-fund empire; Drew Hagel, a failing realtor with a fatal urge to play ball with the big boys; and, on the wrong side of the tracks, David Warfield, a limo driver and sometime drug runner, raising his teenage nephew, Ian, and daydreaming of the sweet deal he could buy into if only he had the money.
Their materialism has rendered them morally myopic, and only Quint has amassed the wealth that turns such flaws to virtues in the eyes of the world. More attentive to irony are the novel's misfits and disappointed romantics -- troubled Ian; Quint's pampered, unhappy wife, Carrie; and Drew's rebellious daughter Shannon, who puts the dramatic plot in motion.
Set on the cusp of the 21st century, ''Human Capital" unfolds like a 19th-century novel, a well-made and densely populated tale that plunges suspensefully toward a fated outcome. Also like its Victorian forebears, it dares to figure openly the great American unmentionable -- social class.
The Send-Away Girl
By Barbara Sutton
University of Georgia, 204 pp., $24.95
These bracingly offbeat stories by newcomer Barbara Sutton have hit the jackpot, winning the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Sutton indeed impresses with her obvious intelligence and her command of style, softened by quirky humor and a sense of compassion for people slipping through the cracks.
In the opening piece, a young girl deserted by her mother is being raised by her eccentric grandmother, with an assist from the boozy clergyman who is the old lady's longtime admirer. The title story, set in Boston in the 1950s, chronicles the travails of a young woman trying to earn a living and growing rapidly dissatisfied with her meager prospects.
In ''Rabbit Punch," a Virginia Woolf scholar on the verge of a nervous breakdown has a mordantly comic meeting of the minds with a disturbed 9-year-old boy. The understated ''Tenants" tells of a bemused woman who can't get her ex-boyfriend to move out of her apartment. She never quite resolves her tenant problem, but she does manage to defuse a police standoff, disarming a temporarily crazed gunman by serenading him with ''Muskrat Love," and disarming us as well.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton. 