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.)
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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
