Now that the baby boom generation is reaching retirement age its members must come to terms with death s new proximity Parents are dying cherished friends are dying The public figures who loomed so large for so many years are dying Not that this is a surprise The World Population Clock tells us

By all accounts the poet Robert Frost 1874-1963 was a difficult man moody contrary competitive exacting Not one would have thought a sympathetic subject for a novel It is all the more miraculous then that Brian Hall rsquo s biographical novel mdash historical novel really mdash weaves

J Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist whose brilliant blue eyes came to express such engulfing sadness, brought a new kind of fire into the world and was burned by it. Like Hesiod's Prometheus, Oppenheimer fought on the side of humankind, giving us the tools and weapons to determine our own fate; and fate punished him for it.

Most of the time we think of the novel as a temporal art form Like music it begins and ends traversing the time between by way of a plot the plot determined to a degree by the characters whose fates are bound up with it But perhaps we can think of another kind of novel one that in emphasis at