Source of book: I own this
Due to a confluence of factors, including the passing of a member, our book club ended up winging it a bit the last few months. As part of this, we ended up just agreeing to read this book, without taking the usual nomination and voting process. My wife read it for her other book club, so it was kind of a natural choice at that point.
In any case, I may have ended up reading it myself anyway, but since it was picked for our club, I definitely read it.
The book is of a somewhat old fashioned format: the epistolary novel. That is, it is a story told entirely through correspondence. This method dates back to ancient Rome, believe it or not, even though the novel itself hadn’t really been invented. There were a few examples in the intervening years, but it was in the 18th Century that the form really became popular.
While the Victorian Era literature moved away from the form, there are a few notable exceptions: Frankenstein and Dracula. A few other novels used the epistolary form in specific sections, but not others.
In The Correspondent, we mostly read the letters of the protagonist, Sybil van Antwerp. There are a few responses, but mostly we get her perspective.
Who is she? Well, she is an older woman, retired from her job as an attorney and clerk for a judge. (For those outside of the legal profession, there are lawyers working behind the scenes of every court, reviewing documents, writing opinions on behalf of judges, and a whole bunch of other necessary legal work. A clerk is not just a clerk, it is an actual lawyer position, with decent pay.)
She is divorced from her ex-husband, Daan, who then moved back to Belgium. As we find out, the main cause of the divorce was the accidental death of their child, Gilbert, and the unprocessed grief both of them had.
There are two other children, Fiona, and Bruce. Sybil is also best friends with Rosalie, who is married to Daan’s brother.
Other significant characters are Harry Landy, a neurodivergent teen (and later adult) who is the son of one of Sybil’s legal colleagues; Theodore, an elderly neighbor; Felix, Sybil’s gay brother; and Mick, a retired lawyer who courts Sybil.
The book takes place over about a decade, the last years of Sybil’s life. During that time, she loses her eyesight, making it more difficult to write.
I hesitate to get into the plot more than that. There are a lot of things for Sybil to process about her life, and a normal amount of family drama.
What I will say is that the characters in this book are very realistic. (The author based Sybil on her mother-in-law.) I feel like I know people like them - every one of them. The story is compelling, and I genuinely cared about how the lives of the characters unfolded. It’s a good read.
It is harder to say whether I liked Sybil. She certainly had her issues - her unprocessed trauma from being adopted, her difficult relationship with her daughter, who felt sidelined after Gilbert’s death, the decisions she made during her career, the failed marriage - a whole bunch of stuff to deal with. She isn’t a horrible person, but she is a bit difficult.
I did think that the epistolary format worked well for the story. The reader has to read between the lines a lot, particularly at first. The writers already have a history, and do not tell everything in each letter. All of the writers choose what to reveal and what to keep hidden - they are as unreliable as anyone else.
I jotted down a handful of lines I found interesting. They aren’t really important to the story, but caught my eye for other reasons.
“There’s nothing quite like the comfort of the law, black and white, other than, perhaps, if you are a religious person, which I am, a religious text, but even the Bible puts one into a wretched state of confusion with all of its doublespeak and nuance, if one really gets into it, though with a religious text one is, of course, suspending all disbelief and throwing caution to the wind.”
“A good punchline is a good punch line regardless if delivered by a man or a woman.”
And a bit from Sybil that reminds me of myself more than a little bit:
“I remember, like you, I was very much a rule follower, rigid about how things ought to be done. I was also very curious, like you…I was quiet and watchful. I remember always finding it odd the way people had of speaking around and around a thing rather than directly to the thing, and I was often punished for insolence and rudeness. Of course I can appreciate now what my mother was trying to do, trying to make me into the polite sort of person (especially as a girl) the world expects, indeed the kind of person American Civilization is built around, but it didn’t stick, and I’ve never really learned that skill.”
Anyway, I enjoyed the book.
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