Customer Reviews

Fall of Frost: A Novel

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4 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(4)

 

 

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 poetry to fill in where quotation of the poetry was forbidden; otherwise, it a pleasurable romp. Those troubled by the use of copyright as censorship might do well to read the fine works of Lawrence Lessig. Something is indeed wrong when "classics" in a culture can be privately owned and their use can be policed. The public's enthusiasm for Frost's work now sustains its value, and the public--and writers like Hall--should be free to do with it what they wish.

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 am a patient reader. I love a long book with a clear story. Hall's previous book, "I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company," is one of my favorites.

"Fall of Frost" fails to deliver. The chapters appear helter skelter, the allusions to a wide variety of poetic lines and images do not connect with any central theme or plot point, and in essence, the story goes in circles.

I do know Frost's poetry. I expected enlightenment about this reclusive, brilliant poet. What I got was bored. . .and that's a rarity for me with books. It grieves me that I cannot recommend this book.

I can't recall reading a book that attracted such opposite reviews by literate people as this one has. Usually one sees the sophisticated, literate reviewers on one side, and those seeking simpler fare on the other, but not so for Hall's novel.

My own reading of the novel is very positive. Anyone who has read far enough in the reviews to reach mine, already knows that the book has 128 chapters that range back and forth in place and time. Written mostly in third person, there are a few passages in second person, addressed from Hall to Frost. These are unusual techniques but I believed they worked. At least they worked for me.

Hall's exposition of Frost's life follows many threads at once - his naive politics, his ineffectual farming, his awkward career of sinecures in academia, his frustrating family life, and through all of these threads, his poetry. Each thread is introduced in early chapters and developed in middle and later ones. We come to understand them not by seeing his life as a sequence of phases, but as a whole composed of antecedents and consequents, each one shedding light on the earlier as well as the later parts of his life.

Frost is presented as a garrulous, difficult man. He cares deeply about his family but doesn't know how to give anything of himself to them. Very serious about his work as a poet, he feels alternately pleased with himself and incredulous that anyone would be pleased with him. He is more than slightly out of joint with the reality around him. He needs to cast his experience into words, not so much in order to understand the world, which he never seems to do very well, but to understand his own feelings.

I don't know anything about Robert Frost. I'm not able to judge whether Hall's view of the man is accurate. But whether it is or is not, it nevertheless gives us deeper and more complex avenues into his poetry. It took a bit of reading to get into this book, but the further I got, the more I liked it. Hall's appreciation of Frost seems superficially critical but, at its core, I believe it is deeply sympathetic and understanding.

If you are reading this review and have not yet read Peter Behrens' review reprinted here by Amazon from the Washington Post, or the poet's grandson's review (see Robert L Frost), I recommend them. I also liked some of the contrary reviews, for example the one by L. Hart.

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.

Tried to read this book even through I was warned about the format from the previous reviews. I looked forward to reading a novel about my favorite poet, Robert Frost, but believe me, the reviews are true! Don't waste your time trying to read this book. It is a series of very short paragraphs lumped together and labeled "chapters" that keep jumping back and forth through several time periods, and nothing flows smoothly.

I would still like to read about Frost but think I will try a biography.

Book is a disappointment......

I wanted so bad to like Brain Hall's new novel, Fall of Frost, but I couldn't. It wasn't the odd and difficult structure that got to me. It was the need to be a Frost scholar in order to understand and appreciate the chapters that created my frustration with this book. It's my opinion that the work qualifies more as a dissertation than an accessible work of fiction.

Hall readily admits, in his Author's Notes at the book's end, that Fall of Frost is more biographical fiction than real fiction. After all, Hall relies heavily on the known facts of the great poet's life, transcripts from which he draws the dialogue, and real letters that are quoted or paraphrased. Hall is not so much as trying to educate the non-scholar but "to suggest how a great writer's language flows out of his life and back into it, how certain mysteriously fecund words and their associated ideas are turned under in the writer's mind, whence they sprout daughter ideas, seedlings that are turned under again, until the mind `can contain itself no more, But sweating-full, drips wine and oil a little.'" This sentence from the Author's Notes provides the perfect example of how this book is written and how difficult it is to sometimes follow.

Another item of note that truly surprised me was the fact that the Estate of Robert Frost refused to grant Hall copyright permission to duplicate poems not already in the public domain (works published after 1922). Although Hall doesn't know why permission was refused, the lack of the complete poems makes some of the vignettes difficult to understand and makes the work almost impossible to understand.

I feel I must comment on the Fall of Frost's odd structure. The time frame is fractured between various times in the Frost's life. For example, Chapter 1 occurs in 1963, Chapter 2 in 1900, Chapter 3 in 1940, Chapter 4 in 1874, etc. Personally, I like the non-linear format because Hall linked together important and influential part of Frost's life. That made for a much more interesting reading than a strict chronological structure.

Armchair Interviews says: Might be of interest to Robert Frost fans.

There is no shortage of factual information about the life of Robert Frost - selected letters, collected letters, family letters, memoirs and reminiscences by friends, and the many biographies published since his death 45 years ago (including the much discredited but official 3-volume biography by Lawrance Thompson).

Now, for the first time, a novel about Frost has been published in America. I say `novel' because the publisher (Viking) calls it that on the dust-jacket. But Fall of Frost, by Brian Hall, is a bizarre blending of fact and fiction.

Mr Hall is at pains to justify his approach in an `author's note'. His aim is `to trace what I consider important contours of Frost's extraordinarily lush and difficult mental landscape....' I am not sure what a mental landscape is - lush or otherwise. More straightforward is Hall's desire `to accommodate more speculation than nonfiction generally allows.'

If you like a novel that engages your emotions and your intellect, that draws you into the situations and characters depicted by the author, that takes you page-turningly along from beginning to end so you can see how a character develops through time -this is not the novel for you.

The book contains 128 untitled and usually very short `chapters' (most of them range from a few paragraphs to two or three pages). They are in seemingly random order. I can only suppose that the author's study was covered with piles of paper - 128 piles to be exact - and one day he scooped them up, in no particular order, numbered the piles and sent the manuscript to his publisher. Some piles contained his notes from biographies, others his quotes from letters, and still others his creative writing, i.e. imagined dialogues between Frost and his children, or Frost's internal monologues. Some piles contained bits of poetry - Shakespeare, Dickinson, Hardy, Larkin and Edward Thomas, as well as Frost.

To give an example here is chapter 67 in full:
`Edward Thomas to Robert Frost, December 15, 1914:
I will put it down now that you are the only begetter right enough.
Robert Frost to Edward Garnett, April 29, 1917:
Edward Thomas was the only brother I ever had.'

The following chapter jumps ahead five decades, and is headed `Saint Petersburg, USSR, Tuesday, September 4, 1962.' This is the first paragraph:
`Alone with his fears. He's locked himself in his hotel room. His first reading in Russia is tonight at six, in the Pushkin House.'

Note the use of the third person omniscient narrator. But a few pages on, chapter 70 begins this way:
`You've always been touchy about those three years in England. Larry isn't the first person to think you planned it all ahead of time: go to England and market yourself as a Yankee poet, then return to America and market yourself all over again as a British-approved product.'

`Larry' is the biographer Lawrance Thompson. Note that the narrative voice is now in the second person. This is very odd indeed. Have you ever read a novel that uses the second person? I haven't. Perhaps the use of the 2nd person is not unknown in fiction, but the problem is that here it is used so inconsistently. Why the omniscient 3rd person should make a sudden arbitary shift into the 2nd is not at all clear, and only adds to the general confusion. In addition, when Hall shifts into this 2nd-person narrative voice, it often sounds as if he is hectoring Frost.

This novel - fragmented, disjointed and sketchy as it is - gives the impression that Frost was proud, vain, petty, bossy, manipulating, selfish, and unaffectionate. For example, as omniscient narrator Hall tells us: `He's always been kinder in letters, where the conversation can proceed exactly as he wants it. In a person's presence, something gets him - fear he'll be touched, maybe; hugged, smothered.'

I don't agree with this view; and if Frost did have more faults than most of us, I'm happy to forgive him because of the poetry. But while thinking about Hall's reasons for writing this book, I realised that he hardly has a good word to say (as novelist or biographer) about any of the other `characters'. Frost's parents, sister, wife and children are all flawed in this account.

If you don't already know a good deal about Frost, the fractured chronology will deny you the pleasure of seeing his life, with all its tragedies and triumphs, unfold from beginning to end. The absence of any old-fashioned story-telling makes the book tedious as well as confusing.

Hall's efforts to explain the biographical origins of the poetry are simplistic. For `The Road Not Taken' we have this: `"May Hill or Malvern?" Frost asks at the path fork and, amused, watches Thomas agonize. Whichever way they go, they're sure to miss something good on the other path.' You can imagine Hall's take on the origins of `Mending Wall'. Frost notices some gaps in his farm wall and thinks, `"Something's doing it. Or somebody. Why would they?"'

In a baffling chapter (no. 42) consisting of one long paragraph, with an uncertain setting, some lines from Wilfrid Gibson's poem `The Golden Room' are used as evidence that Frost talks too much. (`You always were a slow thinker. ... So you orate.'):

`In the lamplight
We talked and laughed; but for the most part listened
While Robert Frost kept on and on and on.'

Gibson is not mentioned and few readers will know where this quote comes from. This is a pity as Hall's quote is incomplete, and he has completely distorted Gibson's view of Frost. Where Hall puts a full stop there is actually a comma, and the poem continues:
`In his slow New England fashion, for our delight,
Holding us with shrewd turns and racy quips,
And the rare twinkle of his grave blue eyes?'
(The question mark is because Gibson is addressing his wife, and asking her if she remembers the evening.)

I had hoped to like this book, and more importantly, to gain some insights into the mind and emotions of a complex and brilliant man who inspired both Edward Thomas and Andrew Motion to write poetry. Now and again Hall produces some well-written passages and moving scenes. But it requires patience and tolerance to get through the dross to find the worthwhile nuggets.

What really struck me about "Fall of Frost" was the novel's unconventional structure. Instead of following the chronological timeline most biographic novels take, Hall's book is presented as a series of short chapters that give us a glimpse into a frustrated, complicated life.

Non Frost scholars like myself will be amazed at the chaos, death and mental illness that plagued the great poet. The book at times feel similarly chaotic--we are hurled from a moment in Frost's early days, to a moment in the 1940s, to his time in Russia meeting Khrushchev and so on. So the real continuity is an emotional one; for example, one section lines up Frost becoming comfortable in his Massachusetts farm, then to him not daring to even glance at its dilapidated shape on a car ride over a decade later, then to "The Novelist" exploring the refurbished farm in 2004. We get to trace exactly how crucial moments (like the death of his fellow poet and friend Edward Thomas) echoed through the rest of his life.

The breadth of the novel is striking. Every thought coming from Frost feels true to his nature, and when we step outside of Frost's world (including a lovely, brief chapter focusing on Kennedy) the characterizations feel just as true.


A fine, captivating book. I cannot wait to read more from this author.

I found myself skimming over the distant biographical aspects of this tale and focusing, instead, on the segments dealing with Frost's fictional encounter with Khruschev (and the aftermath of that encounter.) For some reason the rest of this book just didn't grab me.