Summary: A beautifully told story in letters.
There is some irony that just a couple of days ago I wrote a post about not liking to read letter collections and how I always get bored before I finish them. And today I am going to strongly recommend a fiction book that is formatted as a collection of letters. I know not everyone is an audiobook fan, but if you do audiobooks, I would start with this on audio. The production and editing is top notch and the various voices reading the letters give context to the letters. It is going to vie for my favorite audiobook ever. (Colin Firth’s narration of The End of the Affair by Graham Greene has been at that place for a long time, but this is right there.)
This is a book that I have great appreciation for, in part because it is pushing back against speed and efficiency in a helpful way. The story is about Sybil, a divorced, retired woman who lives alone just outside of Washington DC. She was a lawyer in private practice with a long term friend. And when he was appointed to a judgeship, she took the pay cut and became his chief clerk. She retired when he retired after 28 years on the bench.
The story unfolds slowly as she writes letters to friends and family and various celebrities, especially authors. I don’t know if Virginia Evans got permission to write in the voice of various authors, but Sybil is a great reader and letter writer and when she reads a book she loves, she writes the author and tells them. And as she says throughout the book, a surprising number of people will write back if you write them. So in this book of fiction that takes place over about 10 years, there are multiple letters to Joan Didion, who she has developed a friendship with, but also a teen boy of a law clerk she mentored, and a friend who she has been writing for nearly 60 years.
I do not want to give away the plot because part of the beauty of the book is the slowly unfolding nature of the book. The reader discovers, along with Sybil, things that she has not always allowed herself to understand. One plot point that I am going to ruin because I think (in the original nature of the term) that a trigger warning is needed. Much of this book concerns the grief of losing a child and the way it impacted herself, her then husband, and her other children. I know too many people who have lost a child, and I don’t know that people who have lost a child will want to read this. And even those who have not lost a child, may not want to read about that grief.
This is a hopeful book. A book that shows that we can push back against the currents of grief and modernity. The slow practice of carefully expressing yourself in hand-written letters is a lost art. There are a number of letters to or from a person that are only one or two letters. One of those is from a high school student who has to interview someone in the legal profession for a class. She starts by writing Sybil because she can’t find an email or phone number. In the thank you letter after the interview, she asks if Sybil will be a pen pal because she has never had someone write her a letter before.
CS Lewis wrote a fictional book Letters to Malcolm as a method of talking about prayer and spiritual formation that I loved. Eugene Peterson also had a book about friendship that was written as letters, as well as a book written with his son about what it means to be a pastor that is just letters between the two of them. Stanley Hauerwas has a book of letters to a godson that is about developing character and virtue, that again is a collection of letters. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is framed a long letter to his son. These are a mix of fiction and non-fiction, so The Correspondent isn’t a brand new format. But this is done particularly well. I am going to buy the kindle version when it goes on sale next and read it again in that different format. I think I will still love the audiobook version more, but this is a book that I think deserves a second reading.
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook