A Cataract of Ruin

““Even his bright gildings,” Herman Melville once wrote of Nathaniel Hawthorne, “play upon the edges of thunder-clouds.” This was in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” an 1850 appreciation in which Melville reputed the notion that Hawthorne, fifteen years his senior, was merely “a sequestered, harmless man””

“In a sentence like “Their bodies were never found”—that’s where Melville’s Man of Mosses resides. It’s the kind of cackling kiss-off that puts Hawthorne alone among his peers. Who else would refuse to name a protagonist whose defining feature is his desire to “build his monument”? These are narrative strategies we take to be bad manners in an author; Hawthorne doesn’t seem to care about his characters or his readers. Few fiction writers, even your dyed-in-the-wool metafictionists, make use of this kind of cosmic irony—but when it’s done well, as it is in “Guest,” it’s at once bitingly funny and legitimately unsettling. To read “Guest” is to watch Hawthorne play a very wanton God: he creates a cast of characters with only the mildest of imperfections and then, just as we’re settling in, he kills them all.”