I re-read Roger Malvin's Burial last night and was quite impressed. It's a funny thing about Hawthorne. People despise him; sometimes I despise him. His writing is extremely ornate and pretty, sometimes wordy to no obvious point. But there is a point. A Hawthorne story or novel is like an exceptionally detailed painting where everything is very acute, where you can miss a lot if you read it quickly, or if you become impatient for it to move, and yet everytime I finish one of his stories, I know I've really been somewhere. The story by itself is sometimes clever, sometimes not, but with him I think the style is the story over and above everything else.