THE CORRESPONDENT by Virginia Evans

 

Finished reading THE CORRESPONDENT by Virginia Evans yesterday. Ms. Evans’ novel is a hot best seller and one of the best reads of the year. It has some similarities to Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden in that both books feature a singular main character who is hiding an element of the past that is slowly revealed as the book progresses. The difference is that Evans uses letters (an epistolary form) to reveal the world of Sybil Van Antwerp and her friends and family.

Sybil is, a divorced and now retired lawyer, who spent her working life as a legal clerk to a highly successful judge. She is now experiencing retirement alone and exposed to all those things that she may have given up to serve him. Her marriage has produced two living children and one who died at the age of eight. She is also an orphan, working through how much she wishes to know about her DNA, her birth parents, and her previously lost family.

A hand-written letter writer all her life, Sybil is now facing blindness and the loss of her ability to write and read responses without help. The letters she has sent over the years are carefully and beautifully composed in a style that would make Jane Austin proud. They inch us slowly forward in time and reveal the path of her own failures and successes in relationships, marriage, and parenting. Central to the plot are the little clues to the identity of one person she often writes a letter to, but never puts in the mail. As her sight declines, she begins to see more clearly the lingering grief that has haunted her and how forgiveness can heal her suffering soul. 

This may be an especially engaging book for older readers who may, like Sybil, be spending some time assessing their past. It may also be attractive to a younger reader who is thoughtfully contemplating the future. For every reader there is a lucid analysis of the impact of a female’s career choices and behavior on her future.  There is also an implicit shout-out to the efficacy of the very act of writing letters by hand--an act that has almost disappeared from our culture.

This is a significant novel. I give it a five out of five and not just because she apparently wrote the entire book in a closet from 4:30-7:30 AM while raising two small children and working full time.

Jim De Young