The Book: Sybil Van Antwerp is a retired lawyer, long divorced with two living adult children who worry about her living alone. But she likes her house overlooking the river and her garden. Three days a week Sybil sets aside time for her correspondence. Sybil prefers writing letters to personal interaction. Writing helps her make sense of the world and helps her build connections with other people. She writes to her brother, her best friend, her neighbor, the young son of a former colleague, as well as famous authors like Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. She even writes to George Lucas. And sometimes they write back. She talks about the books she is reading and what is going on in the world and in her life. Through all these letters the reader gets to know Sybil, her background, her hopes, her fears, the mistakes she thinks she has made and the successes that she has had. But when she begins to receive anonymous letters from someone who claims to have been harmed by her in the past, she begins to worry.
The Author: Virginia Evans
Genre: Literary Fiction
Length: 475 pp (ipad mini e-reader)
One good thing: Evans has created a memorable, wholly formed character through the letters that Sybil writes and receives. She was a character I wished I could meet in real life.
One not-so-great thing: At one point Evans has Joan Didion write back to Sybil (they clearly have been corresponding for years). They are discussing the death of a child. Of course Didion wrote an entire book about the death of her child (as well as a book about the death of her husband), but it made me a little bit uncomfortable reading a fictionalized letter from her on this subject.
Doorways: Story; Characters; Setting; Language**
This is a character-driven novel, not plot-driven. There is a plot as we come to care about what will happen to the different people to whom Sybil writes, but primarily we are watching the arc of Sybil as she deals, over the years, with old age. She becomes very real through her letters, always her irascible self but deeply caring about the people she loves. The setting in Maryland is not particularly important to the novel although Sybil's garden and path down to the river are important to her. The Correspondent is an epistolary novel that covers a number of years. Some people don't like epistolary novels. I happen to love them because I think they are very good at revealing character if done well, and this is done very well. Through the novel Sybil stays truly herself no matter who she is writing to but reveals different parts of herself to the different people to whom she writes. And despite the fact that Sybil seldom leaves home, the letters have a propulsive sense that carries the story along.
**"It seems to me that all works of fiction and narrative nonfiction are broadly made up of four experiential elements: story, character, setting, and language. I call these “doorways,” because when we open a book, read the first few pages, and choose to go on, we enter the world of that book. And I’ve come to believe we can help readers better choose their next book by looking at the proportion of these four elements." Nancy Pearl on the Four Doorways.
