Birth, Backwards

Victor stops writing home. For two years he sees no friends, reads no letters, and notices no season, and Charlotte Gordon reads that vanishing as the novel's whole argument in miniature: obsession is what ambition looks like when nobody can reach you. Then the night itself, a birth run deliberately backwards, with a first kiss, a dead mother, and a newborn creature folded into a single paragraph. Gordon thinks those were the first pages Mary Shelley ever wrote, and she reads the book that grew around them as a confession with one refrain: not my fault.