The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

I must confess that I am a Hawthorne devotee for the most part ... though given that his body of work is so small, that doesn't mean much in terms of heavy reading. I loved The Scarlet Letter and "Young Goodman Brown," enjoying the 20/20 hindsight narrative voice Hawthorne loves to use and the sometimes overblown language. I expected I would enjoy The House of the Seven Gables as much as those, if not hopefully more.

The novel follows the fortunes of one Pyncheon family somewhere in New England, the last remaining scions of a once prosperous clan with Puritan origins, whose first head, one Colonel Pyncheon, deeply coveted a piece of land belonging to another man. Faced with his neighbor's refusal to sell the plot, Colonel Pyncheon orchestrated a blow that eventually got the man killed and got himself the land. Supposed to be cursed by his wizard neighbor, Pyncheon built himself a large timbered home with seven gables (hence the title) but only had a little time to enjoy it before being found mysteriously dead in his study in the midst of a family gathering.

Readers meet Hepzibah Pyncheon, a spinsterly recluse who, up against her own insolvency, determines to open a penny store from her home in the House of the Seven Gables, despite her possibly clinical agoraphobia and xenophobia. She is allowed to live in the House by the kindly (or not-so kindly) graces of her cousin, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, who cares little for the House or for his poor relations. But the character the readers will care about the most is their young cousin Phoebe, who comes to live with Hepzibah and brightens her life and that of her mentally disturbed brother, Clifford, who later returns home from a mental institution.

The novel explores their lives and woes, but does so in a dreadfully gloomy way--some might say, characteristically Hawthorne. However, it is in an entirely different spectrum than the gloom of The Scarlet Letter; whereas we have a cultural impression of Puritan New England as being gray and rather dour, Seven Gables takes place in the present of the novel's publication, about 1850, well into the beginning of American prosperity. It as is if the cultural haunting of his Puritan ancestors that Hawthorne is said to have dwelled upon permeates the entire narrative and beglooms it and the reader both. This novel may very well have been Hawthorne's attempt to excise this cultural guilt he felt. Again, in contrast with The Scarlet Letter, the moralizing and elevated language here seem to stiltify rather than enhance the story.

Overall, I would recommend this to Hawthorne lovers and those who enjoy a gloomy read every so often.