REPRODUCTION

The author of Trinity (2018) asks what Frankenstein can tell us about motherhood in the 21st century.

“I began work on a novel about Mary Shelley in 2018, when I was pregnant for the first time.” So begins this novel that is—obliquely—about Mary Shelley but is not that novel. If the previous sentence makes you wince or causes your eyes to roll out of your head, you probably will not enjoy the novel that is this novel. Same if you savor plot, action, and a rich cast of fully formed characters. If, however, a semiautobiographical, plainly feminist, sort of science-fiction exploration of what it means to create life sounds intriguing to you, read on. The unnamed narrator of this genre-defying book loses her pregnancy. She also gives up working on her Mary Shelley novel, but she doesn’t stop thinking about Mary Shelley. The earlier writer’s masterpiece and her biography provide a framework that helps the narrator understand both her pregnancy loss and—later in the story—the birth of a daughter. The narrator thinks about Shelley’s experience of loss while trying to make sense of her own. She contrasts her own creation with Victor Frankenstein’s while also comparing herself to Capt. Robert Walton, the Arctic explorer Frankenstein meets while pursuing his creature. This book would be valuable if only for Hall’s phantasmagorical depiction of childbirth and her honesty about how lonely mothering can be. But Hall also situates her story in a world in which gene-editing technology and climate change and global pandemics are real. Like Shelley herself, Hall provides readers a text composed of diverse parts, a text that readers can endlessly take apart and stitch back together to create new ideas.

Body horror and philosophy commingle in this strange, enthralling novel.