A novelist attempts to write a book about Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, a mother and artist whose harrowing pregnancies reveal the cost of human reproduction. Soon, however, the novelist's own painful experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, as well as her increasing awareness of larger threats from climate change to pandemic, force her to give up on the book and turn instead to writing a contemporary Frankenstein, based on the story of an old friend who mysteriously reappears in her life.
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.
