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Loving Frank: A Novel | 
| Author: Nancy Horan
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $7.23
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Avg. Customer Rating:  118 reviews
Sales Rank: 53
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0345495004
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780345495006
ASIN: 0345495004
Publication Date: April 8, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com
Amazon Significant Seven, August 2007: It's a rare treasure to find a historically imagined novel that is at once fully versed in the facts and unafraid of weaving those truths into a story that dares to explore the unanswered questions. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney's love story is--as many early reviews of Loving Frank have noted--little-known and often dismissed as scandal. In Nancy Horan's skillful hands, however, what you get is two fully realized people, entirely, irrepressibly, in love. Together, Frank and Mamah are a wholly modern portrait, and while you can easily imagine them in the here and now, it's their presence in the world of early 20th century America that shades how authentic and, ultimately, tragic their story is. Mamah's bright, earnest spirit is particularly tender in the context of her time and place, which afforded her little opportunity to realize the intellectual life for which she yearned. Loving Frank is a remarkable literary achievement, tenderly acute and even-handed in even the most heartbreaking moments, and an auspicious debut from a writer to watch. --Anne Bartholomew
Product Description
I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.
So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.
In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America’s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney’s profound influence on Wright.
Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan’s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah’s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel’s stunning conclusion.
Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.
Advance praise for Loving Frank:
“Loving Frank is one of those novels that takes over your life. It’s mesmerizing and fascinating–filled with complex characters, deep passions, tactile descriptions of astonishing architecture, and the colorful immediacy of daily life a hundred years ago–all gathered into a story that unfolds with riveting urgency.”
–Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light
“This graceful, assured first novel tells the remarkable story of the long-lived affair between Frank Lloyd Wright, a passionate and impossible figure, and Mamah Cheney, a married woman whom Wright beguiled and led beyond the restraint of convention. It is engrossing, provocative reading.”
——Scott Turow
“It takes great courage to write a novel about historical people, and in particular to give voice to someone as mythic as Frank Lloyd Wright. This beautifully written novel about Mamah Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright’s love affair is vivid and intelligent, unsentimental and compassionate.”
——Jane Hamilton
“I admire this novel, adore this novel, for so many reasons: The intelligence and lyricism of the prose. The attention to period detail. The epic proportions of this most fascinating love story. Mamah Cheney has been in my head and heart and soul since reading this book; I doubt she’ll ever leave.”
–Elizabeth Berg
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 113 more reviews...
 Searching for Self: Mamah Borthwick Cheney's Story July 19, 2008
In her first novel, "Loving Frank," Nancy Horan attempts to explore the architecture of the at-the-time scandalous relationship that brought Frank Lloyd Wright, famed creator of Taliesin and other organic building structures, to the sacrificial altar of the predatory yellow press from the perspective of his lover and supposed soul mate, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. As little is known about Mrs. Cheney other than a smattering of facts, history pigeonholes her as either the notorious married woman who after commissioning Wright to build her Oak Park, Illinois `Prairie Home' in 1903, seduced him and eventually ran off with him despite the existence of respective long term spouses and young children, or the burgeoning feminist whose particular stance in an atmosphere peppered with the likes of suffragettes, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony centered around the issue of free love. Having no other choice, Horan uses her imagination along with her garnering of information from Wright's autobiography and sensational newspaper articles besmearing the couple to facilitate a seemingly insider's view of Cheney's relationship with Wright and build an entire 400-page novel around her mind's vision of the pair's psychology.
Whether or not she succeeds or not is left to the reader. For me, Horan's telling attempts to connect the dots between the only known four major factual backdrops from the time period the novel spans with imagined filler that gets the reader from point A to point D--in this case, Oak Park, Europe, Japan and Wisconsin. Beginning in Illinois, the author introduces the reader to Mamah's typically feminist perspective regarding her personal lot in life. We are not present at her first meeting with Wright, the object of her affection; this occurs prior to the novel's start. However, rather immediately, the reader knows intrinsically that Mamah, unhappy with her role as Edwin Cheney's wife searches for what she believes may be more. Conveniently and serendipitously, Wright acts as both fuel to fire her independence and an obsession that for the most part adversely clouds her personal career objectives. Is she giving it all up for love? Or is she merely bored and willing to be swept away by the flamboyant and narcissistic architect? Wright is more than able to envision his world and move heaven and earth to achieve it without regard for whom he leaves flailing in his wake. However, does Mamah pursue her dreams with the same blind ambition? Does she even have a dream other than living and breathing all things Frank Lloyd Wright? Because the actual facts are scant, Horan substitutes the character's dilemma with regard to her mindset in opposition to the times and its mores to flesh out the story. In this light, whether it be a true or false depiction of the flesh and blood woman, the fictional Mamah transforms from a tragic victim to an everywoman who desires that purposefulness that has become synonymous with the present day campaign to live one's passion. As Horan follows the historical timeline, she switches the venue to Europe in 1909 as Wright heads to Germany to work on the Wasmuth Portfolio--the first publication of any of Wright's work--then onward to Japan--the scene of Wright's bargaining to acquire ukiyo-e woodblock prints--and finally, to the creation of his artistic Mecca in Wisconsin, as he creates the world-renowned Taliesin and sets a media-feeding frenzy in motion that inadvertently lead to the horrendous slaughter at his conclave on August 15, 1914.
As Wright moves steadfastly towards Taliesin and the founding of his architectural training ground, Mamah continues to struggle for self-occupation and self-purpose. Immersing herself in the study of Swedish to enable her to translate the works of contemporary feminist writer Ellen Key, she holds fast to her nebulous ponderings that attempt to justify the leaving of her children for a life with Wright against a tide of disfavor from family, friends and the general news-reading public. Sadly she fails to accomplish this reckoning. Instead, she retreats, choosing the contained seclusion of Taliesin where her main activities include the difficult task of keeping Frank financially solvent.
Bottom line? Horan's "Loving Frank" transforms from a mere recounting of the love affair between Mamah Borthwick Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright to a story of every woman who disillusioned by a conventional life struggles to find a balance between who she loves and what she wants to achieve for herself. Because Horan aligns her story to an actual timeline, she is constricted by events that allows her heroine plenty of angst but denies her any real growth. The telling of this tale lacks a feeling of authenticity; again, as Mamah remains an enigma due to a lack of documentation, I wonder if Horan herself struggled with the middle portion of this novel and allows Mamah's internal strife to become almost a cliched filler for the climatic end tragedy. Interesting, but not always as compelling a read as so many of the other reviewers have suggested. Recommended with the caveat that the author seems to stretch out the body of the novel to remain true to the actual story's placement in time. I look forward to reading Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders for more facts regarding this tale.
Diana Faillace Von Behren
"reneofc"
 Terrific July 18, 2008
Terrific! Well done, Nancy Horan, on your first novel. Hopefully, your work will be awarded a richly deserved literary prize. Well conceived and well researched with a penetrating insight into the relationship between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick - their scandalous and well publicised love affair, a century ago, highlights issues which are still valid in today's society.
Right On Wright July 18, 2008
This is a love story fraught with uncertainly, public wrath, and all the elements of drama. The love relationship between Mameh and Frank is a case where life is greater than fiction. Yet, it takes a great skill and imagination for an author to breathe life into the characters and events, and Horan has done so with grace and lyrical fluidity. Frank Lloyd Wright was a figure larger than life. It took a woman like Mameh to challenge him and make him also a better man. As this great architect sought to be himself and live a life of truth and beauty, the educated Mameh, a writer who spoke several languages also learned the meaning of freedom. However, being a feminist (before the term was familiar) and loving Frank came with the ultimate price, first with the loss of her children whom she had to leave behind, then the painful public scandal, and finally, the greatest price of all as she paid with her life.
A fabulous book that is hard to put down.
Run to buy this book! July 17, 2008
It's been a long time since I've read a book I could not put down. The writing was wonderful.I know it's fiction based on fact but if it was written solely as fiction one would not believe the ending! I LOVED this book and highly recommend it.
good read July 14, 2008
Good, quick read. I'm hoping the important facts are accurate even though it is a novel. Good choice for book club.
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