Fall of Frost

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.)