Brian Hall's "Fall Of Frost"

The time has come at last to plump for our friend and neighbor, Brian Hall, whose new book Fall of Frost was published by Viking the other day. The novel is a fictionalized life of the poet Robert Frost, and was inspired by an event late in that life: his meeting, in Russia, with Nikita Khrushchev.

Why this meeting isn't better known is anyone's guess; it's not even mentioned on Frost's Wikipedia page. Not long after reading "The Gift Outright" at Kennedy's inauguration (instead of the poem he was supposed to read), Frost persuaded the administration to let him make a sort of informal diplomatic mission to Moscow. By Hall's reckoning, Frost had the noble but naive idea that he understood the kind of man Khrushchev was, and could break through the rhetorical impasse between east and west by speaking with him directly. The meeting was, of course, of no real consequence, until now, when it has inspired a really wonderful piece of work.

Hall's last book, I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company, was a fictional account of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and is one of the best biographical novels I've ever read. That's not saying much, because, as I've said here before, I can't stand biographical novels. Unless, that is, they are amazing, and that one was. Ambitious, broad in scope, intensely imagined, it ought to have given Hall an airtight reputation as one of our best novelists.

I'm not sure that it did, though. Historical novels usually don't make literary reputations; they mostly make historians hate you, sometimes with good reason. So it was with perverse joy that I learned that Brian's next book would be...another historical novel, this time about a poet. The man just couldn't get enough. And I'm sure that there will be many biographers of the poet who will have some manner of hissy-fit over this book.

But like I said, Fall of Frost is fantastic, not as biography, but as literature. With the Khrushchev meeting serving as a kind of flash-forward backdrop, the book examines Frost's life in fragments, filtering known biographical details through a fictional consciousness that can only be described as spectacularly vivid. This Frost feels like the Frost of his poems. It is unsullied by the kind of scholarly agenda that mars most biographies (and indeed, we are treated, in the book, to a darkly hilarious glimpse of Frost's first, hostile biographer, Lawrence Thompson); instead, it strives to construct a probable Frost-mind, an emotional and intellectual landscape upon which events of the poet's life are projected. We get the devastating deaths of his children; his marriage, and later, his affair with his married secretary; his thorny relationship with scholars and readers; his walks in the woods and lame attempts at homesteading. He comes off as a complex, deeply flawed, and eminently likeable character. The life was long and tragic; the book is articulate and quite funny.

I dunno. I know I said I hate the bionov. But there's something to be said about the value of such a book--even beyond its value as a literary work. A novelist, or at least this novelist, puts together the pieces of a life in a different manner from a biographer. Fall of Frost is the life of Frost as your friend, your intimate. It's the life of Frost, as if you were Frost. It is not like a biography at all, and maybe that's what makes it so good.

One caveat--the version I read is not the version you can now go out and buy. Because the Frost estate withheld from Hall its permission to quote the later poems, he was forced to go back, post-galleys, and feverishly rewrite a lot of scenes. To hear him tell it, the result is different, but of comparable quality. But to be safe, I'm not going to quote anything here.

In Which I Contradict Myself

(First, an aside: I just now noticed that Rhian's post yesterday was our THREE HUNDREDTH. Wow!)

If there's one literary trend I can't stand, it's the rise and continued popularity of the bionov. You know what I mean, those books in which the lives of the famous and dead are fictionalized. Girl With A Pearl Earring was probably the one that pushed me over the edge, with its smarmy passages about the act of artistic creation, and since then we've had a steady stream of the things, most of them quite lazy and ultimately disrespectful to their subjects. Can't these writers think up their own damned characters? Can't they manage to invent a plausible course for a life to follow, rather than crib one from a biography? Can't they find some scrap of genius within themselves, instead of riding its coattails? In dramatizing the epiphanies of the great, the bionovelist gets to nick a bit of that mojo for himself: journals and letters at the ready, he lays one hand on the laptop, and snakes the other up the ass of Virginia Woolf, or Albert Einstein, or whomever. The bionovelist pads her tale with source materials, heavily seasoning her prose with the products of a superior mind, then gets to talk with Terry Gross about her obsession. Bionovels are wrong. They're necromancy. They're sick, and they suck.

Except...you know...when they're awesome and, um, life-affirming. And, uhh, bristling with moral authority. Like for instance the W6 favorite The World As I Found It, Bruce Duffy's hilarious, moving fictionalization of the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Or our friend Brian Hall's epic stunner I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company, a reimagining of the Lewis and Clark expedition--or his forthcoming Robert Frost novel, Fall of Frost, which I am now reading in galleys. I hate to say it, but this book is incredible--a quietly devastating piece of work that reaffirms both the poet's and the novelist's brilliance. When it comes out next spring, I'll devote a post to why it's so good.

For now, though, I will have to be content, once again, with chastising my own rush to judgement. Sometimes, it seems, a great mind of the present can multiply itself by a great mind of the past, and create something unique and wonderful, something that stands on its own. There is a line somewhere, an ill-defined boundary, which divides the abominable from the beautiful, and there is almost nothing capable of living in between--above that line we find the history plays of Shakespeare and a handful of novels; below it festers just about everything else. You come out of a bionovel a hero or a goat, and just about everyone comes out a goat. I had a good idea for one once, but forget it--I'll be keeping my distance from that literary third rail. To be honest, I don't have the guts.