Correspondence concerning "The Correspondent"

Dear old friend,

I've been wanted to send you Virginia Evans' novel The Correspondent but right now I can't seem to organize my life enough to put it in the mail, and on second thought it's the kind of book I look forward to reading again so maybe you should find your own copy. Sending you the book would be the kind of gesture that, over time, builds a friendship like ours, but you're the kind of friend who will understand that sometimes it really is the thought that counts.

How are things with you? Kind of difficult here, with frequent disruptions due to my son's health problems, although I hesitate to call them disruptions because it sounds so negative, as if I resent him for getting cancer. I would gladly take the cancer away from him if I could but since I can't, I'll drive him to Columbus for extra tests, cook the foods he likes best, clean up his vomit, and closely monitor my phone throughout an important meeting with the visiting accreditation team because my husband took our son to the emergency room while I was still barely awake this morning and I need to know what's going on. (Electrolytes are low. Maybe something more. Who can say? Nothing I can do for him at the ER so I'll keep busy here as much as possible considering multiple distractions.)

One of the things I really like about The Correspondent is how our main character, Sybil Van Antwerp, deals with the distractions that interrupt a life she considers alternately mundane and miraculous. A retired attorney and judicial clerk, she devotes her life to writing letters (some by hand, some by email) four mornings each week, an ongoing "correspondence that is her manner of living." She writes letters to friends and family members; to famous people like Joan Didion, Ann Patchett, and Larry McMurtry; and to strangers, some of them hostile, whom she somehow manages to transform into friends over time.

But that makes the book sound too saccharine. She's a feisty old lady, revealing fragments of herself to a variety of correspondents and requiring readers to assemble the puzzle of her complex character. Her voice is, by turns, angry, prickly, condescending, sarcastic, self-righteous, cranky, curmudgeonly, conciliatory, tender, and loving, and in the end she's a character with whom I'd gladly spend more time--hence my desire to re-read the book. 

You might enjoy this book because Sybil shares our love of reading. Nearly every letter refers to some book she's reading, and her letters to famous authors reveal how reading helps her understand herself and her world. In a letter to Ann Patchett, for instance, Sybil explains why she appreciates a particular character in State of Wonder: "I saw some reflection of myself in her. The agonizing ethical questions for which the reader puts her on trial. That amazement one feels at this stage of life--a sort of astonishment that is also confusion, which leads to a sort of worry, or a sort of fear, I guess. How did we get here?"

And I see some reflection of myself in Sybil's seeing some reflection of herself in Patchett's book, making the book a Russian nesting doll of character analysis. 

Like Patchett, Evans invites readers to put her main character on trial. Sybil has always welcomed the clarity law provides; at one point she explains why she pursued a career in law at a time when the field did not always welcome women: "The appeal for someone like me (us) to find, on the face of this mad, inside-out, senseless, barbaric, intolerably fraught and painful and mind-spinning planet, some semblance of order...well, of course it's appealing. There's nothing quite like the comfort of the law, black and white."

But the letters reveal that nothing is quite as black and white as it appears. Feisty Sybil first resists admitting culpability for both minor blunders and major disasters, but over time the blinders come off her eyes--even as she is literally losing her eyesight. She tells various versions of the truth to different correspondents but reveals the whole truth over time only to a correspondent she calls Colt, whose identity is revealed late in the book in a tender but harrowing revelation of personal pain.

Moving toward the end of an eventful but misunderstood life, Sybil seeks connection and significance. "I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction," she admits, adding that it is

a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I'm getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside.

She returns to this image late in the book, after her correspondence has brought together disparate people from all over the globe, people who would not have known each other except for their connection with Sybil, who has transformed these isolated nodes into a rich and thriving community, including one character to whom she reveals her shame over a long-ago tragedy, a character she tells, "it's taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid, so thank you for that."

And that's another reason I wanted to send you this book: you have been on this road with me, have welcomed me into a comfortable space with a warm fire and a table laid, and I'd like to thank you for that before it's too late.

That's ultimately why the correspondence exists: to share the bumps in the road with someone willing to walk alongside. For Sybil, the letters she has sent out and those she receives 

are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn't there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one's life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it's a very small thing, to someone?

And that, I guess, is why I write to you and why I'd like to send you this book, to scatter puzzle pieces or chain links or dandelion seeds across the miles in hopes that some meaning will survive beyond our separate selves. If I can't send you the book right now--well, you're just the kind of correspondent who will understand.