Loving Frank: A Novel by Nancy Horan.
Ballantine Books, 2007. 362 pages.
It's a shocking love story! It's a cautionary tale! It's biographical fact! It's page-turning historical fiction! It's about architecture! It's about questionable maternal instinct! It's about a culture that represses the intellectual development and emotional liberation of women! It's all about Loving Frank, and this beautifully-covered novel blends just-so fact and juicy fiction as it traces the scandalous love affair between free-thinking Mamah Borthwick Cheney and surprisingly amorous genius architect Frank Lloyd Wright. It all starts in 1903, when unsympathetic character Mamah and her long-suffering husband Edwin commission unsympathetic character Frank to design a new home for them. Frank, we soon discover, has designs on more than the floor plan, and Mamah likes Frank's style. Their startling behavior provides a blueprint for the brutal and all-too-non-fictitious ending.
The Paris Wife: A Novel by Paula McLain.
Ballantine Books, 2011. 320 pages.
Resonant historical fiction imagining the courtship and marriage and matrimonial dissolution of excellent expatriate novelist Ernest Hemingway and excellent Midwesterner Hadley Mowrer. In Jazz Age Paris, Ernest writes, struggles, eats, drinks, cheats, and writes about writing, struggling, eating, drinking, and cheating. He is ambitious and treacherous, wears ratty sweaters and doesn’t bathe as often as he should. Hadley supports Ernest as he writes, struggles, eats, drinks, and cheats. She doesn’t complain about his ambition, his ratty sweaters and his hygiene issues. As for the treachery... well, she looks the other way for a preposterous length of time. This one is best served as a tasty appetizer to A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises.
Ballantine Books, 2011. 320 pages.
Resonant historical fiction imagining the courtship and marriage and matrimonial dissolution of excellent expatriate novelist Ernest Hemingway and excellent Midwesterner Hadley Mowrer. In Jazz Age Paris, Ernest writes, struggles, eats, drinks, cheats, and writes about writing, struggling, eating, drinking, and cheating. He is ambitious and treacherous, wears ratty sweaters and doesn’t bathe as often as he should. Hadley supports Ernest as he writes, struggles, eats, drinks, and cheats. She doesn’t complain about his ambition, his ratty sweaters and his hygiene issues. As for the treachery... well, she looks the other way for a preposterous length of time. This one is best served as a tasty appetizer to A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises.
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.
Vintage International, 1995. 603 pages.
Mumbai, India, 1975: not the best of places and not the best of times. By the sound of it, in fact, one of the most dreadful places and some of the most difficult times. Breaking with one of our stubborn and perhaps irrational customs, we choose this, an Oprah Book, and are immediately impressed by Mistry’s deft portrayal of domestic mayhem during The Emergency, a twenty-one month period of Indian history when civil liberties and common decency went by the proverbial wayside. Governmental oppression, political unrest, and deteriorating social conditions compel four characters to share an apartment and to participate in each other’s lives. We participate, too, moved by the simultaneously heartbreaking and humorous assault upon the loves and lives and limbs of all involved.
“Who can forget the hair collector?” asks KMJ. She finds the novel Dickensian in its complexity and depth, with richly-drawn, sympathetic, and oftentimes comically repellent characters. And we declare it a modern classic, one that illuminates the darkness and elevates the downtrodden to something bright and finely balanced, in the great tradition of memorable fiction.
