The Perfect Book

Four chapters in, Marshall makes the case for her title. The novelist Jennifer Haigh teaches Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as a perfect book, and Marshall shows you why: a narrator who works like a movie camera, zooming in on Hester's thoughts and panning out to the crowd in the marketplace. She also finds Hawthorne looking forward: Pearl's unruliness as a portrait of inherited trauma, and Hester's permissive mothering matching what the Hawthornes practiced with their willful daughter, Una.

The thing you might miss is the needle. 'She possessed an art,' Hawthorne writes of Hester's embroidery, and Marshall hears in it his own writing and Sophia's painting; read on, she says, with Hester as a stand-in for the artist. Chillingworth admits 'mine was the first wrong,' and Marshall traces the novel's doubts about marriage to the free love arguments Hawthorne met at Brook Farm and through Margaret Fuller. Her closing question: does taking your fate into your own hands mean tempting it?