A Life in Letters

If you remember the days of sending and receiving physical letters in envelopes, then you are part of an ever-dwindling group, and likely to enjoy this lovely novel.

It’s 2012, and seventy-three year old Sybil Van Antwerpt has a regular schedule of daily activity: making her bed, washing the dishes, watering the plants, dusting the shelves, and finally, taking her mug of Irish breakfast tea to her desk, where she carries on an extensive correspondence, largely via pen on paper.

Sybil is a mother and grandmother, divorced, retired from a distinguished career in law, these things are all around her, but [..] it is the correspondence that is her manner of living.

To whom does Sybil write? There is her brother, Felix, gay, married to his longtime boyfriend Stewart, living in France, who gets long letters with loads of detail. Much closer, there is her neighbour down the street, Mr Lubeck, who sends her flowers from his garden and gets tersely polite notes of acknowledgement. There is Harry Landy, the 10-year-old son of her colleague, who is ‘on the spectrum’, to whom she writes sympathetic but forthright monthly letters. There is Rosalie, her oldest friend, married to the brother of her ex-husband. Further on in the book, she has not just one but two suitors.

Sybil does not restrict herself to people she knows in person, however. She writes to Ann Patchett and Joan Didion, among other authors, and they (mostly) write back!

Dear Ann

I am writing to congratulate you on your most recent novel, State of Wonder […] (I should add, for clarity’s sake, that I did write to you when I finished reading the book before this one, Run, but I never heard back, but that’s fine, so don’t give it a second thought.)

Sybil has been writing to authors for decades. As a teenager in 1955, she wrote to CS Lewis who recommended his friend Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in his response :-). The letters are charming, thoughtful, and a wonderful window into Sybil herself, who is prolific and energetic, but also not one to let a slight go unmentioned. These being modern times, Sybil also sends the occasional email to her local garden club, or to a customer service representative; those emails too are distinctly original.

She also writes letters to herself, or perhaps a diary, where she is brutally honest and includes details that are not in the letters she sends out.

I wrecked the car. [..] I was driving just like usual, slow and steady, but something occurred. [..] Quite suddenly, I couldn’t see.

Sybil, an avid reader and writer, is losing her sight. Over the course of the novel, her life history is slowly exposed: she and Felix were adopted, she had been married to Daan for many years and had three children, and then came the awful swimming accident where her middle son died, and the marriage did not eventually survive Sybil’s subsequent emotional withdrawal. Not surprisingly, Sybil now has a fraught relationship with her grown-up children, Bruce and Fiona.

At Sybil’s age, some percentage of events will inevitably relate to the passing of friends and relatives, and so it is here. Sybil’s mentor, Judge Guy Donnelly, dies, and a local news reporter publishes a ‘Whatever Happened to Sybil Van Antwerp’ article, speculating about the reasons Sybil left her remarkable law career to become Donnelly’s clerk. (This decision turns out to relate to the age-old marriage/children vs career question, but I didn’t think it was very well developed.)

Geographically further away, her ex-husband, Daan is dying, and writes her an agonizing letter before passing. Sybil’s unwillingness to go to the funeral cause an even deeper rift between her and Fiona.

There are other letters coming into her mailbox too: a series of threatening notes that suggest they come from someone she has apparently wronged during her career. Her children give her a DNA kit: does she really want to know who her parents were, why she was given up for adoption, and if she has genetic relatives?

These are a lot of rich seams to mine, and the novel does a lovely job of maintaining all the threads while revealing more about Sybil along the way. The letters to Rosalie seem fond and friendly at first, but then the reader realizes that Rosalie is caring for a disabled son as well as a husband who is slowly slipping into Alzheimer’s. Now, Sybil’s snarky comment about Rosalie’s lack of response (‘Waiting for your response to my last, but cannot wait forever’), and Sybil’s letter itself, full of complaints about her daughter Fiona, seem more self-absorbed than sweet.

Also disconcerting is a brisk letter she writes to Donnelly’s widow, with hopes that she is settling into widowhood and enclosing a 25% off coupon to Applebee’s. Yet some of her other letters show great empathy. She is certainly flawed, but also very human.

Readers may be amused or miffed that she is enthused about Patchett and Didion and Louise Erdrich, but Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone gets only

I had to look up how to spell [his name]. The book is very long.

More unpleasantly, her initial emails to a customer service representative include

Typically speaking with customer service agents somewhere over in India is excruciating. [..] I found your English quite passable, a cut above what you usually hear from foreigners, so crack on wherever it is you are over in the east.

The rep, it later turns out, is Bassam, a Syrian refugee with an advanced degree in engineering who now works as a customer service agent in California. You’ll be glad to know that Sybil’s further correspondence with him is improved in tone from the above.

If I have a quibble, it’s that the ending is a little too perfect, with all the threads resolving peacefully; in real life, one apologetic letter rarely cancels out a lifetime of self-absorption. On the other hand, real life is grim enough that a happy ending is more welcome these days.

The Correspondent may seem at first like an old-fashioned and charming novel about a lady who writes letters, but it is, in fact, much more, and well worth reading.

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