The Correspondent by Virginia Evans: book review
Sybil is a believer in being a correspondent. When she sits down to write her letters, it is the most meaningful part of her day. She takes pride in her handwriting, in the precision of her phrasing. Sometimes she writes multiple drafts. Only occasionally will she stoop to emailing with loved ones as a means of keeping in contact. Sybil doesn't fly, doesn't really travel at all. Her grown children live far away, and she's divorced. When the book starts, her world is her garden club and her letters, many of which she sends to famous authors, giving reports on their books that she's read. This leads her to exchange letters with luminaries like Joan Didion.
The entire book is told through letters, both the ones that Sybil sends and those she receives (and occasionally ones she writes and doesn't send), though sometimes we only see one side of the exchange. The first letter in the book is from 2012, and the last is in 2020, constituting a full chapter of Sybil's life as the plot threads that are small seeds at the start of the novel have come to full bloom by the end, even in this unconventional format. There is a strong element of plot as the letters track across a handful of threads—the possibility of Sybil dating again and the surprising love triangle she finds herself in, her strained relationship with her daughter Fiona and her grief about losing her middle son, Gilbert, when he was a child, lingering doubts she has about her professional life despite being long retired and the ominous letters that arrive in her postbox that seem to stem from her past work, the ancestry DNA kit she gets for Christmas, and her dogged determination to keep auditing English courses at the local university even though the new dean is determined to stand in her way.
No one, of course, was expecting a thriller here, though there is a surprising amount of tension that Evans bakes into the letters from the vaguely threatening feeling of the anonymous notes she gets connected to an hold court case she worked on, the awkwardness of contemplating finding love again in your seventies, and the questions surrounding Sybil connecting with her biological family as an adoptee. There's also the heavy understanding that she will one day soon go blind, stealing from her the ability to read and write, her two great passions. My eyesight is terrible, and I know that it will only get worse with age, so watching Sybil experience this was giving me some serious future anxiety. There is also the looming knowledge, given Sybil's age and the years that keep progressing, that there is a likely event that will necessitate the end of the novel. I wanted to see how Evans was going to land it. I was also surprisingly enraptured by her years long fight with the college English department.
It is hard to tell a full-bodied story solely through letters, as much as I am a fan of the format, and Evans does it well. Rarely does it feel like a character is creating a false pretense to info-dump or backfill for the reader. Sybil writes to such a wide range of people, so she's often filling them all in about one another, creating a chance to pass information to the readers in a more effortless fashion as she disseminates gossip (and I mean that with the most positivity and respect) through her social circles. My main reading experience of The Correspondent, being a twenty-two-year-old, was that it reminded me of the monthly emails I exchange with my grandmother. She and Sybil have an awful lot in common.
While I didn't feel deeply attached to the book or life-changingly moved, I can certainly see why it's so popular (there are over 1,000 people in the hold queue at the Dublin Library, something I've never seen before). It's the first book that I've read in a long time that is a truly dead middle of the road, This Is A Perfect Oprah Book kind of novel that has a little something that would appeal to just about everyone and is an easy, fast enough read to keep people engaged. The truly organic groundswell of hype here is also so heartening to see when it's usually big money and major pushes from within that determine whether a book sails or sinks, regardless of merit. Often, mass appeal leads to a diminishment in obsessive attachment, and I think that's certainly at play here, but we all should enjoy reading books that are enjoyably, wonderfully fine as well. The book was the kind of read that felt like a pallet cleanser, making me excited about the joy that is reading without clouding up my brain or dragging me too deep down into it.
If I was still working in a bookstore, this would be my go-to rec for all those poor people who come in trying to buy a book for someone they do not know well. The Correspondent is the ultimate solution.
Overall: 4
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