I’m reading The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and, well, the title of this post is highly appropriate.

I’ve owned this book for years, after finding it in a thrift store during one of my, ‘OMG, they’re editing all the classics; I need to have these in paper!’ phases that happen periodically. But I never actually read it. Shame on me.

Until now. I needed something new to read and picked House of the Seven Gables off the shelf.

I haven’t decided whether I regret that decision or not. (Fair warning; spoilers below)

House of the Seven Gables… well, the first chapter explains the Pyncheon family, who are supposed to be cursed after their ancestor hanged a man falsely accused of witchcraft in 1692. The second, third, and fourth chapters shows how their fortunes have fallen, in the form of Hepzibah Pyncheon, who is a lady with no income, and is reduced to becoming a shopkeeper. This is deeply distressing to her, and the source of much lamentation. Three chapters worth of it.

Only at the end of the fourth chapter do we get our first glimpse of the heroine, Phoebe Pyncheon, who has come to stay with her cousin Hepzibah. The villain of the piece is mentioned by name by doesn’t make his smiling appearance until chapter eight, a third of the way through the book, and he dies at the end of chapter sixteen. Kind of. There’s an entire chapter dedicated to narrative wondering if he’s dead- more on that later. For now, file this story under, ‘pacing problems.’

And the chapters aren’t short. My edition is about 280 pages. So we’re treated to pages upon pages of wonderfully evocative description- hummingbirds become ‘these smallest fowls of the air,’ for example- and symbolism- the house’s mossy roof and dark rooms are frequently examined as signs of the family’s decay- but not much plot or character development. The only character who changes is Holgrave the lodger, who goes from a free-spirited radical to a domesticated family man as he falls in love with Phoebe; everybody else is pretty much the same at the end as they were at the beginning.

As for the plot…

This thing is the literary version of, “This meeting could have been an email!” We get an entire chapter detailing all the things the villain was going to do that day, only he can’t because he’s dead. I don’t care, Mr. Hawthorne; the villain is dead, and taking an entire chapter to figure that out makes the narrator sound like a moron. Can we move on to what happens afterward?

And when we do move on, all loose ends are tied up with lightning speed. It’s like the author used up all his words in the preceding chapters and had to cram in the denouement. Everyone is reunited; the heroes are cleared of the villain’s murder and one other murder that Hepzibah’s brother Clifford had been accused of; the love interests decide to get married; they all retire to the villain’s house in the country, which they’ve inherited. And that all takes place in only a little more space than I’ve used here.

But I suppose, if the whole book was like that, it’d be a short story of about 5,000 words. Instead we get pages and pages of description, with the plot tucked into the corners in little fragments of sentences. I had to read surprisingly carefully; if I didn’t, I’d get to the end of a chapter and have to go back and figure out who the new character was, or how everyone got from here to there. And I read regencies for fun; complex sentences and slow moving plots don’t usually bother me.

Some of this is the author’s style- I don’t remember much about The Scarlet Letter, which is by the same author, except that it was a slog to get through, and so wordy that I couldn’t extract the plot from all the window dressing. Some of the purple prose is in keeping with writing of the time- I own a couple of architecture books from about the same era (1850), and the wordiness, the callbacks to the past while also reaching forward into the future, the classical allusions, the subtle (sometimes) moralizing- all there, in all their glory. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, written in about the same time, does the same thing.

To be fair, it makes for a very descriptive story, and I’m encountering a lot of words that I know but don’t see very often. I now also want to name a cat Grimalkin, and a rooster Chanticleer, because those are the animals in the story, and anyone who gets the reference deserves to laugh at it.

And I got a blog post out of it. Possibly two; I had some thoughts on message fiction that deserve a separate look. So it was a worthwhile read, in the end.