Loving Frank: A Novel
by: Nancy Horan
Published by: Ballantine Books
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Reviewed by Patty Inglish, MS.
In Loving Frank, Nancy Horan has pieced together an entire saga from news clippings, letters, and folklore surrounding Chicago and related sites. She transliterated it into believability in a woman of independent thought, ala Jane Austen, and the famous and infamous Frank Lloyd Wright. The intellectual Mamah Borthwick was reluctant wife to a Wright client, Edwin Cheney, who literally threw the thinking feminist and the genius architect together and wondered why an affair occurred.
Horan’s transliteration of history and rumor into life jumping from the page follows passages on pages 9 –101. In one scene, Mameh describes living translations:
“Well, it’s a little bit of alchemy, I think. It helps enormously to understand the culture you’re translating from, and then the one you’re taking it into.”
There are concepts in many languages that are nonexistent in others. Transliteration is a sort of language profiling that lifts concepts into a second language in a way to describe un-contemplated ideas understandably to a new audience. It is not simply translating dead-on, word for literal word, to arrive at mechanical structures devoid of emotion, nuance, and layers of meaning. It is not “The Mississippi River is historical, wide and dirty,” but rather, “That Old Man River, he just keeps rolling along.”
Horan achieved alchemy with her Mameh and Frank. They are real people. While both were publicly disparaged for “thinking” in new ways in the late 18th – early 19th centuries, they were also condemned out of envy. People working to transcend a mediocre life are often attacked by the community–whether it is Mamah and Frank, or an urban young adult studying determinedly to achieve a GED certificate.
People did not often marry for love or faith-based foundations in past American centuries. They married to join “good families,” produce heirs, and have children to work on the family farm. For Mameh and Frank, finding a soul mate led to adultery and disaster.
Mamah should have held out and not married the near-stalker Edwin, as Jane Austen did not marry at all.
Armchair Interviews says: Everyone from high school to adult could enjoy Loving Frank.
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