The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

I wish I had been able to read this more slowly & with time to savor and reflect. Brilliantly written story, full of digressions and nature-inspired metaphors, touching on ideas of hereditary personality traits, whether a single evil act outweighs many good ones, and public opinion versus self-knowledge. I especially loved the character descriptions:

Colonel Pyncheon: "Endowed with common sense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, fastened together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps, he followed out his original design, probably without so much as imagining an objection to it."

Hepzibah Pyncheon: "She dwelt too much alone--too long in the Pyncheon house--until her very brain was impregnated with the dry rot of its timbers."

Clifford Pyncheon: "He was probably accustomed to a sad monotony of life, not so much flowing in a stream, however sluggish, as stagnating in a pool around his feet."


( )

I was like halfway through this book before I bothered to look up what a gable is. I imagined it as something cool, like a parapet or a widow's walk. Nah, it's not; it's just this. It's just a thing houses have. So goes the novel.

Hey: Hawthorne is no Puritan conservative. He's a radical. Hawthorne insistently indicts Puritan culture; he once said, "Let us thank God for having given us such [Puritan] ancestors; and let each successive generation thank Him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages." He was really troubled by our history (in large part because his great-great-grandfather was a Salem judge personally responsible for burning a buttload of "witches"). If you had the same impression that I did - that he was a staid old humorless curmudgeon - you were wrong.

And he is funny! Well, no he's not. He's amusing. He's not, like, Dickens funny. Certainly not Wilkie Collins funny. He's...pleasant.

And at his best, he's a towering writer. I can't show you, because it's too long, so you'll have to take my word for it: Chapter 18 of House of Seven Gables is an achievement.

Unfortunately, the other twenty chapters are bullshit. They're boring. He repeats himself chronically: try to find a mention of Phoebe where he doesn't specify that she's sunny, or an appearance by Hepzibah without a description of her unpleasant scowl. His metaphors are famously clunky. His characters have no internal life; they're simply collections of good or bad characteristics. And he's shit at plot: mysteries he tries to build up suddenly dribble away, and the end of the book feels like a kid who couldn't be bothered to tie his shoes up right and just skip-shuffles away down the sidewalk towards an inevitable bloody nose. As Jane Smiley puts it while comparing him to Walter Scott's Bride of Lammermoor:
Whereas Scott is careful to make the psychology of the characters and their interactions mesh with the omens and predictions, so that by acting within character the characters seem to work out their destinies as predicted, Hawthorne is less of a psychologist and more of a moralist. His few characters are not so much agents of the plot as objects of the narrator's observations and victims of circumstances.I went into this book with high hopes. I remember kinda liking Scarlet Letter, and I knew this was supposed to be Gothic-ish, and that's fun; I wanted to like it. I didn't fail to like it. Hawthorne failed to be likable. ( )

Only read The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne before and I enjoyed that. This though, was another story. It started well enough with a Poe-like sense of mystery and doom foretold. But then it tailed off into meandering prose and finished fairly predictably.

Hawthorne is not my favourite writer, I have to say. I found it pretty hard to keep track of what was going on. Okay, I was listening to the audio book and your attention can drift when you do that, but if the book is a good one (as Scarlet was), the audio can hold your attention (as Scarlet did).

The opening passages made me think I was in for a tale of suspense. But when things settled down, I quickly lost interest. None of the characters really grabbed me and, although I knew that the inevitable curse was bound to come to pass, I couldn’t really be bothered either way by the time I’d got halfway through.

With Scarlet, I could understand very clearly what Hawthorne was trying to communicate. The characters were also very strong and memorable. But House is nothing like this. I wonder which my next Hawthorne will most closely resemble. ( )

They just don't come like this any more. The House of the Seven Gables is a book that will take time to read, but is well worth it for the historical events, language, and thought. Relationships between characters are interesting and the history of the house itself brings you far deeper into the story than you could imagine. There is no one plot here, but several moving around and shifting all at once; each character having their own story told to its conclusion. If ever you wanted to pick up a book for the single purpose of diving in to complex language and thought, into deep feelings and actions related to such, this is one of those books. There are scenes and images that will remain with you as beautiful, heart warming, or sad, all the way throughout. Inspiration for writers and thinkers can come from these pages, don't be modern and rush through each page. This is a book best read in time, as if you were living in the days when books were the television of the era. Set aside your schedule for a little while each day and go back in time. You'll be glad you did. ( )

An American classic. A deep novel, but read shallowly for its mood, setting and history, I enjoyed it, anyway. A house, splendid in its time, but cursed from the beginning, exacts its revenge on the succeeding generations of the family whose forbear did wrong.

Wonderful characterization, witty, extremely descriptive. But the ending didn’t hang together for me. Perhaps if I’d taken it more slowly and dug more deeply. Ah well, I’m glad to have finally read it, and enjoyed it very much. ( )