Louisa Hall’s ambitious new novel, “Reproduction”

If you are the protagonist of Louisa Hall’s new novel, “Reproduction,” living through the terror of the President Donald Trump years, the coronavirus pandemic and the ever-escalating climate crisis, you try to write a modern-day version of “Frankenstein” — one that captures the horror of creating life in a particularly contemporary way.

But Louisa Hall is not Mary Shelley, and “Reproduction” is not “Frankenstein.” The novel begins powerfully: The unnamed narrator moves with her husband from New York to Montana while mulling Shelley’s painful experience of pregnancy and motherhood, which influenced, at least to the narrator’s eye, much of her literary output. 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.

That infective ambiance might have been enough to propel a less pointed novel about pregnancy. As it is, Hall’s explicit invocations of Shelley’s masterpiece undermine “Reproduction.” The narrator tries to write a novel about Shelley and goes to the doctor for routine pregnancy checkups. She notices, with something of an outsider’s distant interest, the dire state of the world around her. At some point, a scientist friend shows up, allowing her to explore a 2023 version of the anxieties about technological advancement that so dramatically infuse Shelley’s work. But, in large part because the thrills of “Frankenstein” haunt “Reproduction,” it is hard not to read Hall’s novel without wondering what all that evocative ambiance is building toward.

The answer is, unfortunately, not much, as the narrator rotates through maternal preoccupations. She compares motherhood to life on another planet, reflects on nausea during pregnancy and marvels over the possibilities embodied by a “little baby.” It’s too bad. Hall comes close to giving meaningful voice to the “Groundhog Day” quality of new parenthood: The world suddenly shrinks, as do the everyday actions that seem important within it. But the result is a novel that seems to be always circling its own ideas, never closing in on them.

Perhaps that’s the point. Shelley’s experience of parenthood was one of constant endangerment. She had already lost one child, a daughter, before she began “Frankenstein,” and understood that to give birth — whether to a human baby or a monster — was to put your world up for profound disruption, if not destruction. The risks that haunt “Reproduction” are different; they are focused on the work of conceiving a child. The novel is full of grief, but grief at the loss of something not yet known. It makes a certain kind of sense that its way of examining its sorrow is more diffuse than Shelley’s was. It is hard to find focus in mourning the yearned-for idea of a person.

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. That effort centers on a narrative reveal that comes across as nearly an afterthought — an excuse, even, to justify the narrator having so much interest in what she sees as Shelley’s preoccupation with motherhood.

But while the reveal may have little impact on Hall’s story, its political implications are alarming. Women’s fertility, as Hall’s narrator repeatedly and unhappily notes, is too weaponized an issue to avoid thinking about when pregnant, or when trying to become so. And yet her story concludes with its own weaponization of fertility, one that is distressingly easy to read as a warning against fertility techniques that transgress against the so-called “natural.”

That’s not to invalidate concerns about the potential reach of fertility science. But Hall draws a heavy-handed corollary between the mind-set of the desperate would-be parent and that of the coldly experimental Victor Frankenstein, who never stops to consider whether reanimating a stitched-together corpse might be harmful. It leaves an uncomfortable taste. None of it is wrong, exactly, but it feels poorly thought-through, in a way that makes the rest of “Reproduction” seem less thoughtful, too.

Hall’s ideas about the monstrousness of making another life can be revelatory: I thought for days about her description of the pain of labor causing “a frantic, evil loneliness.” “I am alone and miserable,” Frankenstein’s monster said, more bluntly, in “Frankenstein.” He understood what “Reproduction” sometimes forgets: It is when we pursue seductive theories at the cost of humanity that things begin to fall apart.

Talya Zax is an editor at the Forward. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic and Literary Hub.