Rarely does a fictional character in a novel I read stay with me for much longer than a day or two. This latest novel has been quite a notable exception. I recently finished the debut novel by Virginia Evans with the title The Correspondent. The protagonist in this novel is a septuagenarian named Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer who lives out her remaining years in her home in Maryland. Sybil now has more time to devote to her arcane practice of letter writing, which she does on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (sometimes on Saturday if she isn’t finished).
She has been writing letters since she was a young girl and finds that letter writing affords her the time to fully explore her thoughts, carefully choose her words, and say exactly what she means to say. The recipients of those letters may be a famous author, a magnate of industry, but mostly she writes to her friends and family.
So far, it sounds like a real page turner, Brian. I get that. But what is unique about this read is that the entire book is a composite of her letters and the responses they elicit. In full disclosure, I listened to the audio version of the book and not a printed version. I had no idea what to expect and found myself a bit exasperated with the first few chapters as they were a series of letters to people who had not been introduced. I thought, when are we going to get to the actual text instead of these letters?
After a half dozen or so letters, I quickly fell into the rhythm of the book, and slowly the characters were revealed through the correspondence. This was a very clever technique Ms. Evans employs, and one that I suppose added a certain degree of difficulty in laying out the plot of the book. Through the letters, a story is revealed in full, so it is not just unconnected letters that we are privy to, making the reader feel more like a voyeur who has stumbled on a box of letters in the attic.
Sybil is an interesting bird, and she reminded me of so many women I have known, but in a certain way, she was a blend of both my mother and my mother-in-law. I miss both of these women dearly, and listening to the story, I felt like I was visiting, once again, with each of them. For me, this may have been part of the charm of the book.
Sybil has the disposition, diction, sense of right and wrong, and vocabulary of my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law was a small woman, like Sybil, but not a woman to be trifled with. She did not suffer fools and held people to account for their actions and behavior. In a way, this tiny woman was fearless. Sybil was the same way and almost the same dimensions. Neither woman was to be underestimated.
But Sybil had the warmth, the heart, and the penmanship of my mother. My mother indeed corresponded similarly with her sister, sister-in-law, other relatives, and, in particular, her childhood friend (Alice). In fact, one of the story threads in the book was so familiar because it mirrored the trials of my mother’s real-life childhood friend and her own struggles with losing a son and a husband. My mother and Alice had such a tight bond for over seventy years. It was very sweet. If you were ever lucky enough to receive any written word from my mother (we affectionately referred to her as Mrs. Hallmark), you would have remembered her perfect penmanship, even in her final days.
Sybil struggles to understand her adult daughter and is dismissive of her as a result of never really having a connection. She is haunted by a family member of someone whom she showed no mercy towards and sent to prison. She desperately tries to convince the Dean of the English Department to amend her policy to allow her to continue to audit classes at the university. She becomes a friend to a troubled teenage boy, the son of a colleague, and shows him great mercy. She also befriends an unlikely person via email in a service representative from a family ancestry tech company, whom she previously offended by her racist assumptions.
She is a less than perfect person and is somewhat blinded by her own pride and self-righteousness. However, she is authentic, and now that the book is done, I miss her.
At one point, she finds herself the object of affection of two very different suitors, at a time in her life when she is not at all interested in companionship. She is a solitary figure who suffered multiple losses over the course of her life, primarily the loss of her son and the dissolution of her marriage.
The audio version uses multiple voice actors to represent the different people who write to her. They were instantly recognizable, and I found myself eager to hear their response to the questions Sybil posed. Usually, I find the whole idea of multiple people narrating to be off-putting, because it eventually turns into something resembling a play. In this case, because there is no dialogue per se, each letter writer is reading their own letter to Sybil. This may sound disjointed and distracting. On the contrary, it allowed the reader/listener to focus intently on the message for each person without distraction. I found it to be comforting.
These letter exchanges take place over the course of seven or eight years. As Sybil ages, she becomes a kinder and softer version of herself. She appears to have the hard edges worn off of her, and she finds a path towards forgiveness and reconciliation. There is an evolution of the character over the short window of her life in which we peer. She becomes sweeter, less acerbic. And even finds it in her own way to make room for companionship.
I will read about 50 books this year, and I keep track of them on Goodreads, a website dedicated to books and readers. I rate every book I read, and only rate a handful the full five stars. This one, I am happy to rate with five stars. If you do choose to read it, I would be interested to learn what you thought of it.
To the author, Virginia Evans, I believe you struck gold on your first book. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Sybil and her cast of characters, and I appreciate you also finding a way to remind me of my own mother and mother-in-law. Well done.