Fall of Frost

by Brian Hall Narrated by Dick Hill

Overview

In his most recent novel, I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, Brian Hall won acclaim for the way he used the intimate, revelatory voice of fiction to capture the half-hidden personal stories of the Lewis and Clark expedition. In his new novel, Hall turns to the life of Robert Frost, arguably America's most well-known poet. Frost, as both a man and an artist, was toughened by a hard life. His own father died when Frost was eleven; his only sibling, a sister, had to be institutionalized; and of his five children, one died before the age of four, one committed suicide, one went insane, and one died in childbirth.



Told in short chapters, each of which presents an emblematic incident with intensity and immediacy, Hall's novel deftly weaves together the earlier parts of Frost's life with his final year, 1962, when, at age eighty-eight and under the looming threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he made a visit to Russia and met with Nikita Khrushchev.



As Hall shows, Frost determined early on that he would not succumb to the tragedies life threw at him. The deaths of his children were forms of his own death from which he resurrected himself through poetry-for him, the preeminent symbol of man's form-giving power.



A searing, exquisitely constructed portrait of one man's rages, guilt, paranoia, and sheer, defiant persistence, as well as an exploration of why good people suffer unjustly and how art is born from that unanswerable question, Fall of Frost is a magnificent work that further confirms Hall's status as one of the most talented novelists at work today.

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

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.

From the Publisher

"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." ---Publishers Weekly

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170117536
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	05/19/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged

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