This beautiful novel is already a bestseller. That’s not why we’re reviewing it. In fact, we rarely review bestsellers — and very few novels. But this one’s special — and no other review outlet will tell you how it is a book all about spiritual practice.
Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent is about friendship and forgiveness, empathy and gratitude, meaning and love, and enthusiasm. It centers on the character of Sybil Van Antwerp, who is seventy-two years old when the story begins. Her story is told through letters — the literary genre of this is called “epistolary novel” — that she writes over the span of a decade. Some of the letters are the old-fashioned kind (Sybil likes her stamps), and others are in the form of email. The page design used for the book shows the two types of correspondence in different types/fonts, to distinguish them at a glance.
Evans begins: “Sybil Van Antwerp carries a mug of Irish breakfast tea with milk to her desk. The bed is made, the dishes clean and drying on a towel beside the sink, the plants watered, the shelves dusted. She scoots the chair with precision, then gazes for a few moments out the window over her garden and toward the river off and below…. Sybil is a mother and grandmother, divorced, retired from a distinguished career in law, these things are all there around her…. [But now] It is the correspondence that is her manner of living.”
There are letters to friends thanking them for things, asking questions, reconnecting. There are letters to real-life people — including novelists like Ann Patchett and Larry McMurtry, praising either their latest book, which Sybil has read, or in the case of McMurtry, talking about the enthusiasm she has for his novel Lonesome Dove, and how she reads it over and over.
Sybil writes also to real-life author Joan Didion, talking about her grief to someone recognized as an expert in the same. She tells Didion about the death of her ex-husband, how she purchased a plane ticket, intending to attend his funeral, but then: “At the last minute, three days ago, I didn’t go to the airport. I simply didn’t go. If I regret the decision, then so be it. My life is in winter anyway; only a little while left to nurse regrets.” A little while later, Sybil receives a letter from her ex-husband’s estate attorney (yes — we are shown some letters Sybil receives, in addition to those she sends) telling her that he’s in fact left her “a sizable sum of money.”
Sybil writes of her failures and regrets, but also her joys and questions, from where she sits in the final third of life. Some of her letters set out to challenge others, such as those to the dean of a local college who won’t allow her to audit a class. “Two years have passed since your first refusal, two years of my life I cannot repeat.”
You’ll be surprised how quickly you read this novel. Near the end, we learn that Sybil is going blind. She’s also trying to reconcile with estranged family and old friends. One letter near the end is addressed to her daughter: “Dear Fiona, It’s a few days since our disastrous phone call. I’ve been reflecting on the things you said and replaying our harsh words. I was rather immobilized at the time, and I am certain I said things I didn’t mean. Perhaps I ought to call you, but I am better with the pen and the paper…”
I won’t tell you how the novel ends, but you’ll read eagerly to the finish. For those who’ve been around a while, I would compare it to 84 Charing Cross Road — the epistolary memoir of Helene Hanff published in 1970, as well as the lovely 1987 film adaptation of the same starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. The Correspondent is a story full of heart that should inspire anyone who reads it to connect with old friends, reach out to new ones, share enthusiasms with strangers, and strive to do better.
