Are pregnancy and childbirth the most or least natural things we do? At the heart of Louisa Hall’s brainily visceral new novel is a reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a book whose uncanny energy is forged in the crucible of reproduction. Pregnant, nauseous, fearful of miscarriage, Hall’s narrator fails in her attempt to write a novel about Shelley, in part because her insights about Shelley’s masterpiece have become too turbulent and revelatory. “How could she,” the narrator asks, “a creature who never had a mother, have observed such physical changes with anything other than terror? What am I? she must have wondered. What kind of creature is this?”
Hall is best known for her ambitious AI novel Speak (2015), which intertwines letters, diaries and court transcripts across several centuries to tell the tragic story of the rise and fall of a generation of intelligent, human-seeming dolls. She has now turned her attention inward, in this short, intricate work of autofiction about pregnancy and childbirth. But the preoccupations of Speak are still here: a thread about IVF introduces questions about the relationship between scientific overreaching and “natural” biology, darkened by an increasingly unnatural climate.
