Breaking away

IF the true events on which "Loving Frank" is based were as well known as "The Wizard of Oz" story, Nancy Horan's novel would be its "Wicked" -- the retelling of a tale about a villainess who is really a heroine following the dictates of her heart at any cost. Like Gregory Maguire's story about Frank L. Baum's character the Wicked Witch of the West, "Loving Frank" argues that the issue is not good versus evil but true morality versus conformism -- though real evil does make a dramatic appearance.

Unlike "Wicked," Horan's retelling of Frank Lloyd Wright's scandalous love affair has an insipid title. But I urge you to turn past that -- and perhaps, as I did, stay up half the night to finish it in one sitting.

Martha "Mamah" Borthwick Cheney and her electrical-engineer husband, Edwin, were among more than two dozen residents of Oak Park, Ill., who commissioned the architect to design homes for them between 1889 and 1913. Apparently Mamah (pronounced MEY-muh) was not the only client's wife to have a little thing with Wright. However, this little fling raged way out of control: After conducting a secret affair for years, Mamah and Frank left their spouses and a total of nine children and went to Europe in 1909.

Cheney divorced Mamah, citing her desertion. But although Wright's wife refused to end the marriage, he built the famous Taliesin for himself and his mistress in the hills of Wisconsin, where they lived until a servant set it afire, then killed her, her two children and four others with an ax in 1914 (which may have seemed to the small-minded to be as richly deserved as a house dropping on a witch).

Mamah, a brilliant woman with a college degree, was not suited to the role allotted to educated women of her time. She simply could not breathe, a plight made vivid in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 book, "The Yellow Wallpaper," and Henrik Ibsen's 1879 play, "A Doll's House." Ironically, the way out for Mamah proved to be a house -- one that Wright designed for her family.

In Horan's novelized version of their story, pieced together from newspaper accounts, public records and Mamah's letters, they fall in love over the blueprints, then force themselves apart because she is already pregnant with her husband's second child. But not long after little Martha is born, Mamah lets herself be swept away.