Not for the faint of heart ... Uses Frankenstein as its foundation to conclude with a science fiction story of its own, but what is more powerful about the book is how it captures the life-changing experience of pregnancy and birth.
Disjointedness is the only mode that makes sense, that can reflect the highly politicized, minimally supported experience of being pregnant in America ... One of the remarkable qualities of Reproduction is its way of showing the strangeness of medical procedures as they actually happen ... The tone is frequently glib, a performance of awareness rather than a fully formed thought about the horrors listed ... The subject headings are so familiar that it would take an extraordinary effort to render them newly disturbing. Reproduction is not that effort ... Though its two parts operate in different genres, they share a focus: the narrator rarely takes interest or sees value in anything beyond motherhood.
The novel begins powerfully ... Hall has a way with sentences that toe the line of dreamy and despairing, and it’s easy to feel lulled by the atmosphere she creates, that of an uncomfortably lovely nightmare ... It becomes more difficult to see Hall’s novel’s lack of focus as meaningful, however, once she attempts to mirror Shelley’s portrait of the dangers of scientific advancement.
Brainily visceral ... The book’s triumph is to reveal, brilliantly and with feeling, the uncanny peculiarity of pregnancy and childbirth, and to connect this to all that is unnatural and peculiar about our overheating planet, with pollution and global warming throwing hormones awry and overheating pregnant bodies. It’s the tussle with Frankenstein that reveals how high the stakes are.
Amid these large and lofty questions, Hall’s prose is taut, each word impactful, each short chapter a meditation on what could be. Throughout this slim novel, she continually returns to the evolving conversation between art and science, and to the enduring truth that no action or reaction exists in a vacuum.
If...a semiautobiographical, plainly feminist, sort of science-fiction exploration of what it means to create life sounds intriguing to you, read on ... Body horror and philosophy commingle in this strange, enthralling novel.
