I was skeptical at first that a novel about Robert Frost would work, especially one in which time is fractured into episodes that cut back and forth across the poet's life. But this novel worked very well. It was well-researched, true to its subject, yet imaginative. There was a real development that seemed outside of or above time. Well-worth reading, especially if you like Frost's poetry, but even if not. ( )

4 out of 5: 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.

This review also appears on my literary blog Literary License. ( )

As in his previous novel - I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company - Brian Hall fixes on his subject and renders a deeply poetic and rigorously psychological study of his historical figure (or figures, as in the case of Lewis and Clark). When the subject is a poet (Robert Frost), the poetry is more manifest. Like a smoothed stone tossed skipping across a placid pond, Hall dips in and out of various periods and moments of Frost’s life. The skips are short and rapid - Hall gives us a kilobyte of chapters (yes…really 128 chapters) in a mere 334 pages.

I knew nothing about Frost’s life, and little about his poetry, other than those fragments which are embedded in our common consciousness. Snowy woods, paths diverging, stone country walls….the craggy Yankee. And craggy indeed, is Frost. Hall does a wonderful job of drawing Frost in the context of his family, a little of his parents sure, but mostly his wife and their children, surviving and otherwise. The early deaths, a mid-life suicide, a mental institutionalization…the family tragedies, the moving from place to place, the strain of his marriage and sexual incompatibility, his later affair (real or imagined?)…It’s all a compelling story in its own right, made more compelling due to the subject.

The title comes from a poem fragment (as flower at fall of frost) in connection with his wife Elinor. But all who came in contact with Frost were affected in strong ways. Frost himself both relished and detested the things which fame brought.

In England, where you published your first books, no one had pried, but America was founded on Puritan prying, its symbol is eagle-eyed egalitarianism. America is where the famous make themselves endlessly available (this is my blood, drink) or are scorned for their arrogance and thrown down from the pedestal.

Late in his life, Frost believed he could literally change the world, and got it into his head to wangle an invitation to visit Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow shortly before the time of the Cuban missile crisis. The novel opens with Frost in Moscow waiting for his audience with Nikita. The reader is brought back to Moscow several times throughout the novel, and the arc of his meeting with Khrushchev is completed only near the end of the book.

More than just a faithful literary story of Frost’s life, Hall also is able to integrate a sense of the process of writing, especially poetry - at least this poet’s process. And the thing is, it all flows naturally out of the story. Never does it fall to a strictly academic level.

He tells John an idea he’s been toying with, a new writing project. Scraps of dialogue; things he’s heard through the years while lecturing. Tones of voice and what they suggest. Threats, carping, curiosity, stubbornness, friendship. “;Just pieces end to end. Like those boulders down there.” Frost and John veer down the slope and climb up on the rocks, stepping from one to the other until they reach the edge of Nederland Lake. “But on across. See. The Giant’s Causeway. The giants threw those boulders with no thought about where they’d land, but then they looked and saw a way across the water. Life’s like that. You hurl experience ahead of you, and it somehow makes a road. Crooked, maybe, I’m notsaying. No idea where you’re going. But there’s the road…”

Hall has given us a look a re-imagined look at the writer’s life, and how it shaped him. But uniquely embedded in Hall’s re-imagining, is Frost’s own - how his own life and experience shaped his poetry as well - and how his poetry was shaped and re-imagined through his work.

Everyone knows you can’t be in two places at the same time, but Rob has always found it hard to believe that he could be in two places at two different times. As a boy he used to lie awake at night and recall where he;d been during the day. He could picture it all in detail, yet he couldn’t quite believe any of it; and the more vividly he pictured it, the less he believed.

Maybe you could say that he doesn’t quite believe in Time.

Or maybe you could say that Time is the only thing he believes in.

In the Author’s Note, Hall laments that he was not given permission to quote more fully Frost’s copyrighted poetry, and even interestingly mildly rails against the copyright system - what it allows and does not. Still, Hall successfully integrates much of Frost’s poetry to good use, though I perhaps wold have preferred a little less of that, and a little more of Hall’s own which was shown to more powerful effect in his Lewis and Clark novel. Still, a fascinating work and highly recommended. ( )

Fictional biography of Robert Frost. Didn't like Robert Frost. ( )