The brides of Frank

T. C. Boyle focuses on the females in the scandal-plagued life of Frank Lloyd Wright

All right, I'm going to say it. I wouldn't live in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for all the tea in China. I'm sorry, but not a single Wright dwelling looks even remotely comfortable to me.

Of course, Wright himself was a notoriously uncomfortable person to be around, particularly if you had the misfortune to be married to him. Nothing in "The Women," T. C. Boyle's wonderfully entertaining new novel of the ever-so-tumultuous life and times of America's foremost architectural genius, suggests otherwise. In fact, I can't recall when I've encountered an individual, real or fictional, any more self-centered, manipulative, insensitive, authoritative, yet compellingly fascinating than the creator of such American landmarks as the Guggenheim Museum, Fallingwater, and Wright's showplace Wisconsin home, Taliesin.

"The Women" begins with a chronicle of Wright's relationship with his third wife, the beautiful Montenegrin dancer Olgivanna Milanoff Hinzenberg. Although Wright remained married to Olgivanna until his death, in 1959, their early years together were fraught with duplicity and turmoil. To maintain an air of respectability before his divorce to his second wife, Miriam Noel, was finalized, Wright initially installed Olgivanna at Taliesin as his housekeeper. The ruse didn't work. Rapacious as sharks, reporters descended on Wright's remote pleasure palace.

Self-righteous neighbors shunned Olgivanna. And in "a fugue of litigious ecstasy," Miriam invoked the Mann Act to have her philandering husband arrested for transporting his young mistress across state lines for immoral purposes.

Part 2 of "The Women" backs up to Wright's courtship and married life with Miriam, the former "Belle of Memphis." A confirmed morphine addict, Miriam distinguishes herself by assaulting her husband with a pistol, destroying thousands of dollars' worth of his private Japanese art collection, and very nearly committing suicide in his bathtub at Taliesin. Ungenerous though the sentiment is, it's hard to avoid concluding that Frank and Miriam pretty much deserved each other. Rarely if ever, in the annals of contemporary fiction, have I been so relieved to see a marriage end.

It's no secret that Wright's earlier affair with his first mistress, Mamah Cheney - recently chronicled in Nancy Horan's fine novel, "Loving Frank" - ended with a mass murder at Taliesin. Suffice it to say that by continuing to move his story backward in time, Boyle achieves the best and most satisfying type of dramatic irony, in which his readers are privy, in advance, to the fates of his characters. By the time Boyle introduces Mamah, for whom Wright abandoned his wife and the mother of their six children, I found myself physically apprehensive in anticipation of the mayhem I knew was coming.

Boyle's portrait of Wright himself as an egomaniac dodging his creditors, soaking his clients, and bamboozling his women is deliciously repulsive. At the same time, Boyle does a brilliant job of exploring Wright's matchless artistic sensibilities. "Every minute of every day he felt supercharged with energy, out of bed before dawn and sitting at his desk before breakfast. . . . and still finding time to oversee construction around the place and get out into the fields and garden and dig with his pitchfork till the ideas began to take hold and he'd have to scuttle back to his desk even as his apprentices looked up from their drafting tables in alarm until he sang out a joke and then another and another."

My favorite character in Boyle's latest novel is the co-narrator, a young Japanese apprentice of Wright's named Sato Tadashi. Many years later, Tadashi relates the story of Wright's women to his grandson-in-law and amanuensis, an aspiring and gifted American writer. With his sly sense of humor, sympathetic insights, and tragic personal history as a victim of 20th-century American racism and xenophobia, Tadashi is so memorable in his own right that from time to time I found myself wishing Boyle had brought him forward as the book's sole narrator. Boyle, the author of about 20 works of fiction including "The Road to Wellville" and "Drop City," seems to know everything there is to know about the Americana of Wright's period, from the "coruscating explosion of light" produced by the magnesium powder of the early flash cameras to the way the grille of a big Lincoln Zephyr shines like the "teeth of some fierce predatory animal."

His ability to write from the perspective of an outraged wife, a reverent acolyte, or a crazed murderer is uncanny. My single caveat about the novel is that Boyle is so reliably entertaining that occasionally he succumbs to the temptation to run on for a few paragraphs longer than necessary.

The image of Taliesin - the name comes from the Welsh for "shining brow" - looms over "The Women" like a tangible manifestation of Wright's uniquely American dream. Yet Boyle himself never forgets that the dark, obverse side of our national vision is compounded of the racism, misogyny, and economic injustice that continue to threaten our potential for greatness as much today as in Wright's own era. In this respect, as well as in his inexhaustible capacity to beguile us as a natural storyteller, T. C. Boyle is surely one of our most American novelists since Mark Twain, and one of our very best.

Howard Frank Mosher, the author of 10 novels, including the forthcoming "Walking to Gatlinburg," lives in Vermont.