Fall of Frost

Brian Hall's Fall of Frost is a fictional account of the life of Robert Frost, the beloved American poet. This is an impressionist painting of a novel: one hundred twenty-eight little chapters, all seemingly insignificant swirls and daubs of color, out of order and time, confusing and difficult to understand up close. But when viewed from a distance, these individual brushstrokes meld into an image that captures the nuanced essence of the object (in this case, Robert Frost) more truthfully, perhaps, than the hundreds of faithful reproductions that have come before. This is a novel of shadow and mystery and fuzzy edges, where the players appear more vegetal than human: He married her for the flower that she was. She was even less worldly than he, even dreamier, a lily of the field, neither toiling nor spinning, only reading poetry, letting it gather on her like gold dust, a fructifying pollen carried on the wind. The figure of Frost, impossible to pin down entirely, appears to thrive in the mist Hall creates out of fragments of poetry, memories, and dreams. A challenging read but worth the effort.

How Ms. Thompson can write such a wrong-headed, blind and venomous review of a novel this artful, this carefully researched, this deeply sympathetic and nuanced about a great poet's long and complex life can only come, it seems, from her clutching sense of ownership of the poet and his work. For Hall is not dealing here with marble monuments, as Ms. Thompson would have it. Brian Hall has done nothing less than what all fine novelists do--he has delved deeply into the heart and soul of a character, and has given us a living, breathing man of immense gifts, large flaws, and profound grief. Generous, flinty, funny, thin-skinned, wise and sadly neglectful; a poor man, a rich man; a famous poet, an obscure and largely unpublished poet; and finally a man who suffered losses so horrific they would have served well for Greek tragedy. And at the center of this stunning novel is the poetry and Brian Hall's delicate and deeply intelligent readings of the poems. What we have in the end is not only a magnificent novel, but a deep and balanced portrait of a man. ---- And to attack the novel's gorgeous cover? Wow! That says it all, Ms. T.

I'm quite familiar with this work, having read it closely as a manuscript before copyright claims were used to censor a version with which the rights holders did not agree. You might wonder, "how can one disagree with fiction?" Indeed, how. Fiction is neither true nor false, as it is a product of the writer's imagination. Only a traditionalist would confuse Hall's fascinating work with a biography, and Hall makes it very clear that he is not in any way pretending to present a biographical account of Frost. As a descendant of the poet, I have fond memories of the man, yet Hall's work neither affirms or undermines those memories. It does, however, incite reflection. Biographers and historians--I was once among the latter--are restricted by their genre to examining almost exclusively the "exterior" or public lives of their subjects, as there is no way to "prove" what might have been going on in another person's head. Over the past generation or more, a newer genre that one might call "fictional biography" has emerged, and Hall's Fall of Frost is a fine exemplar. It examines the "interiority" of Frost, unapologetically working with the facts of Frost's life, Hall's own reading of Frost's poems, and Hall's own splendid imagination. By my reading it works quite well as an enjoyable and often amusing (yet at turns dead serious) riff on Frost-isms. We have Frost-isms today because Frost the poet-as-public-man has, thanks to myriad writings about him, eclipsed Frost the friend, great-grandfather, or rival. His work and life are now an integral part of our American cultural space and as a consequence, he can now become an altogether different type of literary figure--perhaps a post-human one. Some have criticized this work for being insufficiently linear, that perhaps Hall is playing tricks with time, or worse, that he didn't bother with chronology. Yet as a long philosophical tradition indicates, the interior life of the mind is not linear, nor is the sense of time experienced as a continuity. For decades now, innovative authors and filmmakers (Fassbinder's Berliner Alexanderplatz comes to mind here) discard linearity to capture the disjointed workings of consciousness. While one might not like the exoticism of the technique, it is certainly not on Hall's part a consequence of indifference or inattention. As life itself runs in forward mode and memory runs in reverse, perhaps disjointedness is the only way to capture the experience. Hall's imaginative work is obviously not for everyone. Those seeking a well-patinated reaffirmation of Frost as a deep, sensitive, yet (of course!) complicated man--and those seeking a straightforward biography--should look elsewhere. Those looking for an imaginative and playful construction of a twentieth-century literary giant through the eyes and imagination of a post-modern twenty-first century novelist will probably be well satisfied. This book is a difficult read only because one needs an approved version of the poe