by Virginia Evans

I absolutely love reading epistolary novels. They make me want to write letters again. Real letters. We live in such an “instant” time where, at the click of a button, we can communicate with no pondering, no pause to clarify our thoughts, no attempt to communicate not just effectively but beautifully.

Years ago, I was lucky enough to read letters my grandfather wrote to  a young woman who would just happen to become my grandmother. They were simple but heartfelt, and I truly felt like I got to know a grandfather I had never met, a man who existed before he was ever a “grandfather” to me. I think we have become a people where, unless we feel we have something important or riveting  to say, we say nothing at all. And yet what we should be doing, what people like my grandfather, did so naturally in the past, is simply share the simplicity of their everyday lives. Little things: the simple goings-on of the day, what you ate for dinner, what books you’re reading, or something as unassuming as the weather.

I lived in Glasgow for a portion of a year, many, many years ago, back when the only internet you could access was at the local internet café where I had pay by the hour. So I wrote letters the old fashioned way to everyone and anyone in my address book: old university friends, my little nieces who were too young to read, previous colleagues, just to tell them about my everyday life living in Scotland. And I received a plethora of mail in return, sometimes twice a day (the Royal Mail was absolutely magnificent). It is a practice I miss deeply. 

All this to say: I absolutely loved The Correspondent.

Our main character is 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired law clerk for a celebrated judge. Sybil has always written letters, first to her best friend Rosalie, whom she met at summer camp as a young girl, and eventually to an ever-growing constellation of recipients: her brother Felix, living in France; her children; her neighbour Mr. Lubeck; various authors she admired, among them Joan Didion and Ann Patchett; a university dean; and others. Her mailing list expands across a lifetime, and we come to understand not only her ritual for letter-writing (she has specific days and times set aside, and spends about an hour crafting each letter, a discipline we learn about through her friendship with a young student who becomes enchanted by the practice) but her motivation as well.

Woven through the novel is something more tender and more sorrowful: through letters, we learn that Sybil is losing her eyesight, and we come to know the heartbreak and tragedy that has quietly shaped her life. And throughout all of her correspondence  Sybil has been writing to someone she never names. In these letters, we meet a different Sybil entirely, unguarded, reflective, sharing her most personal feelings and regrets. These letters are written never to be sent. 

The Correspondent is a beautifully crafted love letter to the art of letter-writing itself. It is also a novel about identity and grief, and the preciousness of relationships and the ways we choose, or fail, to communicate across a life. By the end, I desperately wanted to receive a letter from Sybil myself. It is a quick read, and an easy one to fall into and stay until finished.