When THE CORRESPONDENT, by Virginia Evans, opens readers meet Sybil Van Antwerp who is now in her seventies. She has accomplished a great deal. She was a successful attorney, a wife (long divorced now), a mother and a grandmother. However, there is one thing that perhaps makes her unique. For most of her life, she has been a prolific letter writer. The reason is that she finds it easier to communicate this way. So with imported writing paper, she writes to a varied group of recipients including her sister-in-law, her children, her brother, Joan Didion and once George Lucas to name a few. But perhaps the most important letters she has penned have never been sent. An unexpected letter from someone from her past reopens the most painful memories of her life.
The structure of the book consists of letters only, most written by Sybil and many from those she communicated with. What I found most impressive, is the eloquence of the writing. The letters are elegant and filled with honesty (sometimes brutally so), candor and wit. After reading just a few, Sybil becomes very real. She is a woman with spunk who is not afraid to admit she is fragile. Determined and kind, she is a force to be reckoned with.
The author has created one of the most memorable characters I have ever encountered. Unique, memorable and beautifully crafted, THE CORRESPONDENT is well worth reading. Highly recommended.
“Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, 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 is a very small thing, to someone?”
Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.
Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.
Filled with knowledge that only comes from a life fully lived, The Correspondent is a gem of a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and connection with people we might never meet in person. It is about the hubris of youth and the wisdom of old age, and the mistakes and acts of kindness that occur during a lifetime. Sybil Van Antwerp’s life of letters might be “a very small thing,” but she also might be one of the most memorable characters you will ever read.
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