“Young Goodman Brown” (1835)

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Very Important American horror story gets my goat in a way. The language can be deadly stultifying—well, I always seem to have that problem with Hawthorne, as with Dickens—and the plot points are more like blunt force objects having an allegorical go at your skull. In the end, it was all a dream but was it. With the publication date you have to wonder if it isn’t among the first to use this it-was-all-a-dream-but-was-it stunt (acknowledging I know squat about ancient literature). Obviously, first, “Young Goodman Brown” is a take on the hypocrisies of puritanism and a forthright one too. It sets up as no less than the titanic battle between Calvinism and Satanism (otherwise known as human appetite). But for all the window dressing—and, yes, it’s nice window dressing, in the American style, with macabre bonfire scenes in the autumn night of a deep New England woods. But for all that, ultimately it’s more on the order of an allegory to be ciphered than a horror story as such. All these devilish doings, the serpentine staffs and disappearing acts, etc., are just production design for a community theater story about American hypocrisy. A lot of the horror anthologies snapping it up are maybe more trying to class up their joints with a Great Author. I mean it’s a pure staple of American literature just sitting there. That’s the only way to understand it. The special effects can be delightful but also thuddingly obvious and they are patently not to be believed. That would be superstitious, the story somehow implies. Hawthorne’s wilderness is not as cool and fascinating as Algernon Blackwood’s, say, but has its own tang. There are witches with broomsticks, for example. And these names: Brown, the young good man, is married to Faith. Then there’s Satan himself, done nicely as a shape-shifter but it always feels stagy. And then, I’m cynical, but I had a hard time believing the whole blinking town including most notably church leaders would turn out to be part of a nighttime carousing mob. Beyond the credibility problem (I KNOW IT'S AN ALLEGORY) it seems to be turning cynicism unpleasantly into bitterness, next stop nihilism. If it is all a dream, Young Goodman Brown is scarred for life by it. “Often, awaking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.” That’s how the story ends and it always annoys me and then haunts me.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin H. Greenberg (out of print)
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Father Goriot (1835)

Aka Old Goriot or (Le) Pere Goriot, this is widely considered one of the best novels by one of the best novelists, Honore de Balzac, and since it was my starting point in my meager career of reading him I'm happy to point to it for anyone so inclined. It's positively masterful about the fundamentals of fiction: setting, characters, action, like that. It's so purely conceived and executed, in fact, that it does not appear to require chapters or even section breaks (in my translation by Ellen Marriage). It is rich with insight and incident, moving easily about the playing field it sets for itself: a seedy boardinghouse, the foolish, gallant, and ultimately disquieting figure of the title character, an old man slowly sinking into poverty in order to give his daughters the lives he thinks they deserve. His love for them is impressive if not altogether unsullied, if only because he is a man of the world after all, who earned his fortune as a vermicelli maker. I thought Balzac was amazingly good in this short novel at moving about among the social strata of 19th-century Paris, dwelling among the students and the indigent in the boardinghouse (who are nonetheless furiously attempting to maintain dignity, and position) as well as the elaborate money-dependent rituals of their betters, among whom Goriot's daughters now move. The purity of the narrative stream is all the more remarkable considering that it was originally published in serialized form. This is the novel where Balzac began to enlarge his vision of his larger project, "The Human Comedy," first beginning to use characters from previous novels, as scenery, as context, and as key players in their own right. His characters are always interesting, both as stock types and, as we get to know them better, with their many bottomless complexities. I particularly like the way Goriot's doting over his daughters is hardly an unmixed thing. It's kind of sick actually, and not just on the part of the daughters who use him and take him for granted. It is always recognizable and familiar human behavior.

In case it's not at the library.