Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

Why is Loving Frank by Nancy Horan such a good book for discussion? My book group met to discuss Loving Frank earlier this month and the room was packed. As soon as we got started, as the conversation progressed, as new voices entered the fray, I had a feeling that we had a really good one on our hands.

But why–why did Loving Frank spark such lively, varied responses?

First, it is a historical novel and its main characters are renowned American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his mistress, Mamah Borthwich Cheney. The enigmatic, egomaniac Frank is known, to a greater or lesser degree, by most, but Mamah, the feminist who left her husband and children to be with a married man she admired in the early 1900s is a virtual unknown.

Who was Mamah? What enabled her to make the choices that she did? How could she leave her two young children behind, in an age when distance meant more? Readers, both men and women in the group, could not help but have an emotional response to Mamah’s choices. From one statement to the next it appeared as though they found Mamah both a sympathetic and unsympathetic character. Horan draws Mamah with a compelling complexity–she is as hard to pin down now as she was in her own day.

An entire discussion could revolve around feminism and how women’s choices are viewed differently than the choices of men–what has and hasn’t changed in the last 100 years. The Swedish feminist, Ellen Key, for whom Mamah becomes a translator and her views on women’s roles over time also places Mamah’s life in stark relief against her ideals and the mores of the day.

Then there is Frank. We see him through Mamah’s eyes, a view that is, at times, rose-tinted, written from the heart of their intellectual and erotic affair. But readers still bristled at his arrogance, his brash and inconsiderate ways. For those who knew about his life story, it was hard to trust entirely his love for Mamah. He did, after all, marry another two times, and wrote sparingly of his relationship with Mamah–denoting reverance or dismissal?

Loving Frank is an intellectual romance, and to some degree, whether you are aware of the historical record or not, the end is very difficult to approach. To learn that Mamah’s life, and the life of her children, is cut short through such an act of violence, to have such vivacity and curiousity extinguished is painful to contemplate.

For so many reasons, this book bowled me and my group over. There are so many themes here that resonate in our contemporary conversations about love, marriage, motherhood, art and individuality. As Neil pointed out in a previous post, Loving Frank can also be paired with other fiction and nonfiction works to expand your conversation.

My book group’s discussion was so exciting that it makes it all the harder to start my maternity leave in October. I have one more meeting with them before I go, and I will savor it. Much as I love Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster, I am not certain that it can top our discussion of Loving Frank.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 11:59 am and is filed under Fiction, Good Books for Book Clubs, Reading Guides. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.