Everyone tells you Hawthorne is difficult. Wordy. Dense. The kind of author who makes high schoolers groan and reach for SparkNotes. And look, they're not wrong - the man could take three paragraphs to describe a chicken. But here's the thing nobody mentions: when you actually surrender to his rhythm, when you stop fighting the prose and let it wash over you, something clicks. This audiobook made that click audible.
I came to this expecting to be professionally patient. Twenty years of teaching American lit means I've read House of the Seven Gables probably four times, always on the page, always with a pencil in hand. Listening to it while grading sophomore essays at 11 PM? Completely different experience. Mark F. Smith's narration turned what I remembered as a somewhat dusty Gothic exercise into something genuinely atmospheric. My red pen stopped moving somewhere around the third chapter.
When the Curse Becomes Real
Here's what Hawthorne understood that most modern thriller writers don't: dread is built slowly. The Pyncheon family curse isn't scary because of what happens - it's scary because of how long the weight of it sits on everyone's shoulders. Two centuries of guilt and bad fortune, all traced back to one man's greed during the Salem witch trials. My students would call this "too slow." They'd be missing the point entirely.
Smith gets this. His pacing matches Hawthorne's intention rather than fighting against it. When Hepzibah opens her little cent-shop, forced by poverty to do something she considers beneath her dignity, there's genuine pathos in Smith's delivery. He doesn't rush past the humiliation. He lets it breathe.
And Clifford - poor, broken Clifford, fresh from thirty years in prison with a mind that barely holds together - Smith gives him this fragile quality that made me pause grading entirely. The character study aspect of this novel really shines in audio format. You hear the contrast between Clifford's damaged gentleness and Judge Pyncheon's oily menace. That resemblance between the Judge and the original Colonel Pyncheon? It lands harder when you're hearing the same voice shift between generations.
The Sunshine Problem (And Why It Works)
I'll be honest: Phoebe, the young cousin who arrives to brighten everyone's lives, reads a bit too perfectly on the page. She's almost aggressively wholesome. But something about hearing her dialogue performed made her feel less like a symbol and more like an actual person. Maybe it's that Smith doesn't oversweeten her. She's practical, not saccharine.
The Holgrave subplot - the mysterious lodger with his own agenda - benefits enormously from audio. His story-within-a-story about Alice Pyncheon becomes genuinely hypnotic when narrated. This is where Hawthorne's "wordiness" transforms into something almost incantatory. You understand why Phoebe nearly falls into a trance listening to it.
(My wife Denise, who was trying to sleep while I listened, said it was putting her into a trance too. She did not mean this as a compliment.)
Skip This If You Need Speed
Let's be real. If you need plot momentum, if you want things to happen at a modern pace, this will frustrate you. Hawthorne takes his time. The climax, when it comes, involves a lot of sitting and waiting. The resolution feels almost too tidy, too providential - though that's the moralistic 19th-century framework doing its thing.
But if you've ever wanted to understand why we still read the classics? This is a good place to start. The themes - inherited guilt, the weight of family history, whether we can ever escape our ancestors' sins - feel surprisingly current. Lolita wrestles with similar questions about whether we're trapped by our worst impulses, though Nabokov approaches the darkness from a completely different angle. The Pyncheons could be any family passing down trauma and bad decisions through generations.
Smith's narration is clean, characterful, and respects the material without being stuffy about it. I couldn't find much about him online beyond this recording, but based on twelve hours with his voice in my head, he knows what he's doing with 19th-century prose. The production quality is solid - no distracting audio issues, which matters when you're trying to follow Hawthorne's more elaborate sentences.
I listened at 1.0x because the author chose those words. Some of you will want 1.25x. I won't judge. Much.
Class Dismissed
This is why we still read the classics - and why, sometimes, listening to them reveals something the page kept hidden. Worth pausing the faculty meeting for. (Sorry, Principal Martinez.)
