The Marble Faun - by Nathaniel Hawthorne

I really had high hopes for The Marble Faun, the last completed novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Set in Rome and Tuscany, published in 1860, it ticked all the boxes for a wonderful classic. What I didn't take into account was the turgid prose, the stilted dialogue, and the insufferable condescension of Hawthorne himself. I haven't tried to read him since high school when I read The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. Unlike many authors whom I suffered through in high school, Hawthorne did not improve with (my) age.

The Marble Faun is subtitled The Romance of Monte Beni, and it really is a romance in that there is a merging of mythology, religion, and fantasy in a dreamy world. Midway through the book, I was thinking that the story was actually pretty interesting and would work well if Hawthorne wasn't so long-winded and pompous.

The basic idea is that there are four friends hanging out in Rome together. Three artists and one young Italian nobleman, Donatello, the Count of Monte Beni, who happens to look exactly like Praxiteles' Faun and whose family is said to be descended from fauns...yes, really! The three friends, Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon are larking about and teasing Donatello, but Miriam has a dark secret. There is a man who haunts her steps and threatens her--all very gothic and mysterious. Donatello loves Miriam and Kenyon loves Hilda, but true love never did run smooth.

The problem is that Hawthorne fancied himself Milton and set out to create a 19th century version of Paradise Lost, with Donatello as Adam, an innocent fallen from grace and working to regain paradise. The symbolism is heavy-handed, the characters are wooden and one-dimensional, and so much of the plot points are unexplained and confusing. I ended up skimming the last quarter of the book just to see how it worked out in the end, but I really think that Hawthorne was never really able to grapple with all he set out to do. Also, he succumbed to using stereotypes rather than developing characters.

I didn't care for the book and found it a chore to read...except for the references to places in Rome, which I loved and looked up at every opportunity so it wasn't a waste of time and it does count towards my 2022 Back to the Classics challenge in the category "Set in a Place You Would Like to Visit." I won't be reading Hawthorne again any time soon, but hopefully I will be back in Rome in the next year or so!

There is a great review of the book on GoodReads by someone who didn't like the book any more than I did, but I enjoyed her review immensely. You can find it here.