The Women - plural.

First let me say, and I am the first to admit it, I am pretty superficial. I did not want to read this book because I hate hate HATE the cover with a passion. It is horrible. But, like swallowing a bitter pill, I knew this book would be good for me so I read it. And I liked it.

Frank Lloyd Wright, the father of the Prairie style of architecture and creator of Fallingwater (1939) and New York's Guggenheim Museum (1959), Wright carried on scandalous romances, endured personal tragedy and routinely uttered the kind of arrogant statements that feature heavily in the writing of this novel. A cracking quote serves as the novel's epigraph -

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility; I chose arrogance.

TC Boyle's novel, set in the early 20th century, chronicles the lives of Wright's three wives and mistress from the point of view of Tadashi; a fictional Japanese apprentice and biographer of Wright who inserts footnotes and, we are given to understand, spent many years at Taliesin- Wright's physical and spiritual home in Spring Green, Wisconsin.

Boyle has written about huge historical personalities before - notably, cereal magnate and doctor John Harvey Kellogg in The Road to Wellville and midcentury sexologist Alfred Kinsey in The Inner Circle - but Wright's eminence and notoriety towers over both. Boyle has said The Women "is part of my egomaniacs of the 20th century series," but to me this is the apotheosis. As a study of self-regard, how do you top a novel about Frank Lloyd Wright? With one on Picasso? Or Donald Rumsfeld? Or Kanye West?

A book I read on the Art Noveau movement, the time when Wright was at his height of fame, called it a period of "spiritual anxiety"- old forms of being and living dissolved into the new social, cultural, and moral climate. Ideas about sex, art and life were intertwined. These threads of anxiety are cleverly interwoven throughout the text of The Women.

I feel like his writing is fearless. His novel is epic - big, heavy and well researched. It's hard to belt a theme around such a sprawling body of work, but the cause and effect between human appetite for fame, sex, money, freedom, and the folly of these is what I saw most in this novel. It is emotionally complex and deeply felt - the characters are flawed and perfect all at once. I won't lie, this was not an easy or particularly enjoyable read but the writing, for me, won out in keeping my interest. I think you either need to love the writing style or the subject matter to really like this book, and if you like both you are on to a winner.