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More About This Book

Overview

The life of Robert Frost, brilliantly re-imagined by the author of the acclaimed I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company

Called "a spellbinding prose stylist"(Los Angeles Times), Brian Hall drew extraordinary praise for his novel I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, in which he captured the personal lives of Lewis and Clark. Now he turns his talents to Robert Frost, arguably America's most famous poet. Through the revelatory voice of fiction, Hall gives us an artist toughened by tragedy, whose intimacy with death gave life to his poetry-for him, the preeminent symbol of man's form-giving power. This is the exquisitely rendered portrait of one man's rages, guilt, generosity, and defiant persistence-as much a fictional masterwork as it is a meditation on greatness.

Editorial Reviews

Peter Behrens
Brian Hall presents a vision of Robert Frost as an unsuccessful farmer, tormented father, distanced husband and, most of all, a poet who deals always with the hard pith of things. Hall's themes, like Frost's, are major: love, death, the anarchy of living, the tragedy implicit in creating children and poems. This is a book about a man confronting the world and struggling to make sense, through his work, of what he cannot otherwise grasp. Like Frost's poetry, Hall's novel is pungent, deceptively simple and magnificently sad…It is no news that biographical fiction can sometimes bring a reader closer to a life than biography is able to do. It helps when the novel is a savory pleasure to read, as Fall of Frost is.
—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly

This defiantly nonlinear fictionalization of the life of poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) alternates between Frost's late-life visit to Communist Russia, where he met with Khrushchev, and dozens of vignettes and scenes from the rest of his long life, as well as his work's posthumous reception. Hall (I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company) takes readers from Frost's troubled childhood in San Francisco to his creative flowering in Great Britain at the onset of WWI, to the fraught relationship between Frost-as-widower and his married secretary. The narrative returns again and again to the cold winters in New England farm country that permeated his poetry and his 20s and 30s, but the book's real weight comes from the tragedy of Frost's children's deaths: four of six preceded their father. The deep sorrow and disappointment embedded in Frost's story come through particularly in the included fragments of verse. None of what's here enlarges on the extraordinary amount of biographical material on Frost, but Hall gets deep into Frost's head, an approach that brings a startling immediacy to a complex figure many know only as the author of classics like "The Road Not Taken." (Mar.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
A leisurely, episodic, lightly and sympathetically fictionalized account of the life of Robert Frost. Frost was famously beetle-browed, iconic, irascible, so much so that he was easily reduced to caricature in his own time. Hall (I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, 2003, etc.), who writes that he approached his latest novel "in the spirit of a biographer who wanted to stretch his usual form to accommodate more speculation than nonfiction generally allows," does a fine job of adding depth and dimension to our view of the New England master (who made news only recently when partygoers trashed a farmhouse in which he once lived). Biographers have worked the essential themes of Frost's loneliness and isolation, which pervade his poetry but are not often the stuff of textbook headnotes; Hall traces them further, to the sorrow of loss, the suicide of a son and the madness of a sister. His narrative hops back and forth over the decades, from roughly 1900 to the early 1960s, and partakes richly of the historical record, including Frost's much-noted friendship with Russian ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, as well as his tour, in 1962, of the Soviet Union, which gave Frost (and gives Hall) much opportunity to vent spleen on the matter of totalitarianism. (Frost was against it.) The voice shifts, too, though never disconcertingly, drawing in a range of minor characters such as the acolyte, foil and butt of abuse known only as The Younger Poet ("The Younger Poet drives them through quaint olde Dublin streets, to which Frost pays no attention"). Much of what happens in this eventful novel occurs in the Frostian interior, as when the nature of guilt is pondered via a "longish" poem about middleage shading into old age: "It's about a middle-aged couple, long married, wearied, wary, moving into a country house. They're uncertain they've made the right choice, they're a bit scared by the loneliness and the dark."A rich, contemplative and rewarding exercise in the biographical novel.
The Barnes & Noble Review
In a hotel room in Moscow in November 1962, Robert Frost waits to meet Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Frost has been invited to the USSR by Ambassador Dobrynin for this unlikely conversation, so here he is: old, deaf, and perhaps deluded, the famous poet hoping to persuade the infamous politician to loosen his grip on Berlin and retreat from a nuclear standoff with the U.S. over Cuba. Words, Frost believes, may save the world from imminent destruction. His words in particular. We know better, of course. Within three months the poet will be dead. Within a year President Kennedy will be killed. The planet will survive, thanks to words perhaps, but not those of any poet.

This bizarre scene of Robert Frost on a diplomatic mission could be the opening of a straightforward historical novel or even a literary thriller, but Brian Hall's Fall of Frost aims higher and goes deeper. We suspect as much when the second chapter takes us abruptly to Massachusetts in July 1900. Frost's first child, three-year old Elliot, is dying. "Doctors: they fill the doorframe, impatience in their faces, their black bags swinging at the ends of their arms with a heavy creak," the chapter begins. It ends with an image in Frost's mind of his son feeding the chickens. The child "tucks his feet away from drilling beaks, tucks up his curled hands, laughs in fear. He looks back to his father for protection."

Another blow falls, 40 years later in Frost's life, but just one page later in Hall's novel. On the train from Boston to Williamstown in 1940, Frost encounters an adoring young poet and informs him, "My son, Carol, died last night. He killed himself.... Please don't talk to me anymore." When the scene recurs, towards the end of the novel and this time from Frost's point of view, he reassures the acolyte, "There are more sadnesses than mine." Frost's share, however, included the death of his wife, the death of three of his five children, the committal of a daughter to a mental hospital (a fate also suffered by Frost's sister), and the battlefield death in World War I of his close friend Edward Thomas. There was also, of course, the farming, the fame, the lecture circuit, and the poetry. Poetry that, Frost once said, "means enough without its being pressed."

Frost's life -- and the poetry it produced -- has been pressed to a husk in numerous volumes of biography and literary criticism, but Brian Hall tests a new method of extraction. In Fall of Frost, Hall imagines Frost's life in a series of non-chronological chapters that unfold in a graceful, ingenious loop from the near-end point in 1962, back and forth through childhood, adulthood, and old age, to the poet's last breath in 1963. The result is far more than an inspired act of impersonation. It is an intimate, mesmerizing portrait of the man, of the artist, and of a life rescued, even redeemed, by words.

"[Y]ou can tell that [Edward] Thomas is trying to save his life with what he sees," Frost says in 1914 of the poet and friend who would die in battle a few years later. The same might be said of Frost when he and his wife, Elinor, move to the farm in Derry, New Hampshire, following the death of their first son and the trial of Frost's suicidal despair. "That's what saves you," Frost says of the raw world, newly perceived, "Grief takes so much away, but with the left hand it gives you naked ears, wide-open eyes." His terrible and occasionally terrifying childhood in San Francisco, portrayed here in vivid recollections, is eclipsed by this second awakening in the stony New England fields -- an awakening that will produce a few meager crops and Frost's greatest poems. "Rather play at farming," he berates himself as he rides home through the snow in December 1905. "Rather play at poetry. He hasn't sent out a poem in years. What's the point? They all come back." His horse, sensing his mood, slows down, and stops. Frost sits and bawls, then "looks around at the enclosing curtain of snow," the woods, the road. He follows his mind's wanderings, and at last picks up the reins and turns for home. Through his eyes we too have seen what will become "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

This may sound sacrilegious or, worse still, cute -- the clever novelist dabbling in reverse alchemy, turning poetry back into prose -- but Hall is too restrained and intelligent a writer for that. In his short, astonishingly evocative chapters, he conjures up Frost's perception of an episode or a memory and may then quote a fragment of the appropriate verse immediately afterwards, or pages later. An author's note and footnotes show how firmly the novel is rooted in fact, yet the overall effect is more elliptical than mechanical. Hall's partly lyrical, partly laconic style not only matches his subject perfectly, it also entices gradually, slowing the reader's pace until it matches that of a faltering old man. Following the death of his daughter, for example, "[Frost] looks with impatience and disgust at the sea around him of dead and dying leaves, and a new word occurs to him: 'autumn-tired....' He thinks of Margery, and his heart flutters like a leaf on a branch, wind-shaken, threatening to let go."

Such elegiac passages may join those that beautifully depict a child's world through a child's eyes may as the novel's most affecting, but there is also plenty of dry humor and sour reflection. "When you were at Derry you could hide among unspeaking Yankees," Frost mocks himself, "but now you're famous. Pilgrims come to burn their problems at your altar. So you orate."

Hall's fiction has been compared to that of Michael Ondaatje, but his achievement here recalls that of another Canadian writer, Michael Winter, whose superb 2004 novel, The Big Why, so wonderfully evoked a critical year in the life of the artist Rockwell Kent. Like Winter, Hall understands the danger of sweetening a prickly subject. He also appreciates how claustrophobic it might be for the reader to inhabit the mind of a single character. This problem did not arise in Hall's previous novel, I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, a brilliant re-imagining of the Lewis and Clark expedition, but even there he deftly balanced internal monologue with external description. In Fall of Frost Hall perfects this dual vision, bringing art, ambition, failure, war, love, and loss into view as a painter might, through a poet's eye. --Anna Mundow

Anna Mundow writes "The Interview" and the "Historical Novels" columns for The Boston Globe and is a contributor to The Irish Times.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780143114918
  • Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
  • Publication date: 4/7/2009
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 352
  • Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.40 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Meet the Author

Brian Hall is the author of three novels, including I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, his acclaimed story of the Lewis and Clark expedition, as well as three works of nonfiction.

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Sort by: Showing all of 2 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted January 21, 2011

    Read it.

    I thought the book was beautifully written and interesting. It may be hard for some to get through, however if you can it is quite amazing.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted September 1, 2008

    Long, winding road to nowhere

    The narrative is tedious, and never leads the reader to any deeper understanding of Frost. Disappointing and boring!

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
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