Frank Lloyd Wright was one of architecture’s most outlandish figures, a man who famously pranced around in a cape and ran off with a client’s wife. So a book like “The Fellowship” was probably inevitable. Written by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman, it is a tawdry, often malicious and occasionally entertaining romp through Wright’s long life, focusing with particular glee on the cunning manipulations of his wife Olgivanna, their sex-starved daughter, Iovanna, and his many apprentices, who, according to the authors, ranged from sexual predators to doe-eyed innocents yearning to be exploited for the cause of Architecture.

The authors’ biggest insight, if you want to call it that, is that creative geniuses can also be abusive and self-absorbed. Their second biggest insight is that, isolated for years on end in the countryside, healthy, hard-bodied young men end up having a lot of sex, sometimes with one another.

Beyond the gossip, “The Fellowship” is packed with the tired clichés that have dogged architects for centuries: the leaky roofs, unchecked narcissism and total disregard for clients. The implication is that since Wright was a bad man, his work must contain, somewhere deep in its core, a corrupting antisocial gene. Taking an absurdly simplistic view of both the inner workings of the creative mind and of early-20th-century American cultural life, “The Fellowship” would be more fun if it weren’t also so predictable.

Despite their book’s length, Friedland and Zellman skim over what is arguably one of the most fruitful creative periods of any architect of the 20th century. Between 1899 and 1909 Wright built more than 100 projects, many of them outright masterpieces. The free-flowing “open plan” of the Martin and Robie houses both redefined the inner life of the Victorian-era family and pointed the direction to a new American modernism, their low horizontal roofs suggesting the nation’s boundless future. With the Larkin building, in Buffalo, Wright reinvented the American workplace, creating a towering brick block whose light-filled central court anticipated the conventional office atrium. All of this by the age of 42, when even the most gifted American architects today would still be slaving over minor house additions or hiding out in the protective womb of academia.