The House of the Seven Gables

With the exception of Edgar Allen Poe, I have to admit that I have read very little by the great American writers of the 19th Century. My knowledge of Melville, Cooper, Hawthorne and others has been tempered by my great appreciation for their British brethren of the same time period. The House of the Seven Gables is the first (and so far only) Nathaniel Hawthorne I have read.

I don't know what I was waiting for. This is a great novel which I enjoyed very much. The story concerns the residents of the titular house, the once mighty and now down at the heel Pynchone family. The spinster Hepzibah is the only resident of the rotting old home save for a border, Holgraves, who is an artist. Legend has it that the progenitor of the Pynchone family, several generations previous, stole the land from another family and had the patriarch condemned as a witch. The latter cursed the former, and ever since, strange deaths have occurred at the house.

Soon, Hepzibah's solitary life is altered as first her distant cousin Phoebe, and then her mentally disturbed brother Clifford join her and her border. Phoebe manages to bring light and relative happiness to the shadowy existence of her older cousins, and begins a chaste romance with Holgraves. The idyll is broken up only by the infrequent visits of the wealthy and evil cousin Jaffrey, a local judge who for some reason terrifies Clifford and Hepzibah. Phoebe leaves for a short period of time, and soon the old curse of the house revisits the present occupants.

Hawthorne, in his forward, lets us know right away that the moral of the story is that the sins of the fathers can and will be brought down on the heads of those who come later. The house, a grand edifice when it was new, is a powerful symbol of the ruin that can befall once proud families when wealth and prosperity and built upon deception and greed.

Although the book runs for 270+ pages, very little in the way of action occurs. While that hardly sounds like an endorsement, the truth of the matter is that Hawthorne's prose is so amazing that the reader never feels bored by the lack of a steamroller plot. He spends an entire chapter in the company of a corpse over the course of a night, and his descriptions and intimate way of addressing the reader will put a chill up your spine. There is a great strain of the supernatural in this book, and it is easy to understand why Hawthorne was such a favorite of his contemporaries Melville, Thoreau, and Alcott.

Hard Times

This will be the first of what will be many posts on Charles Dickens. Dickens' life was in many ways worthy of novelization. His contribution to western literature cannot be overstated. Some complain that his books are too long, that he was capitalizing on the days when novels were originally serialized in magazines, and a longer story meant a bigger payday. Still, Dickens' best work is a continuation of the social protest of Swift, but imbued with a comic sensibility second to none. His books are beautiful, sprawling, terrifying, hilarious, and cautionary.

Hard Times isn't one of the books that leaps to mind for a lot of people when you mention Dickens, and certainly some of the other novels deserve to be more well-known. But in Hard Times, Dickens points his microscope at utilitarianism, the tyranny of statistics, and the burgeoning industrialization that was the hallmark of northern Britain in the mid ninteenth century.

The story follows Mr. Gradgrind, the administrator of a school, Sissy Jupe, one of his students, and her interactions with his own two children, Louisa and Thomas. Sissy falls afoul of her school's utilitarian atmosphere by following her own flights of fancy. Over time, Sissy's life becomes intertwined with those of the Gradgrinds and their circle.

Dickens' contempt for some of the hallmarks of British society is well-known, and in other books he targets the legal system, the poorhouses, and the education system. Here, he sees the negative aspects of industrialization and conformity as the killing of beauty and imagination. Like most of Dickens' work, it is at turns tragic and comic. You will not forget the characters at the heart of this dark comedy. I'd rate this as top shelf Dickens, if not up to the standards of A Tale of Two Cities or David Copperfield.

Misfortune

Misfortune was the first novel from Wesley Stace, who is also known as 'gangsta-folk' artist John Wesley Harding. As Harding, Stace has released several albums beginning in the late 1980s. At that time, Stace abandoned a PhD he was seeking in order to focus on becoming a full time professional musician. During that time, he wrote a song entitled 'Miss Fortune' about a male baby who is found orphaned by a wealthy man and brought up as a girl. This song served as the genesis for the novel. (For an extensive interview I was fortunate enough to conduct with Stace about his music career and his first novel, go here.)

Misfortune, which is set in the latter part of the nineteenth century, begins just like the song. Lord Lovall discovers the infant in a trash pile and brings him home, and, for reasons of his own, names him Rose and raises him as a girl. Rose lives an idyllic life in the English countryside, surrounded by family and friends, until secondary sexual characteristics begin to manifest themselves and life becomes, as you can imagine, far more complicated. This exploration of gender, identity, different types of love and the quality of love earned almost universal praise when it was released and appeared on many 'Best Of' lists for 2005.

I loved this book for a number of reasons. Firstly, it can be honestly described as 'Dickensian' in its setting, ambition, and sprawl. Characters have names that would have pleased Dickens, and the bizarre interactions between some of them, and the neat ending, are also traits associated with the master. Secondly, while the style is certainly a throwback to the novelists of the nineteenth century, the subject matter most certainly contains a more modern slant. The concept of sexual identity was not completely foreign to the writers of that time, but probably wouldn't have been viewed through the lens of late twentieth century morays as this book is.

Misfortune is a thoroughly entertaining novel. It keeps the reader interested and is ambitious in scope and size, especially for a first novel (albeit one many years in the making). I love big novels wherein a reader can get lost in a familiar, but ultimately fabricated world, and this is one of them.