The Correspondent — Everyone's Reading This Book Wrong | The Book Brief Project
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The Correspondent — Everyone's Reading This Book Wrong | The Book Brief Project
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Everyone calls this a novel about the lost art of letter writing.
A tribute to slowness, to civility, to the handwritten word.
That misses the point.
The Correspondent is not about the beauty of letters. It is about a woman who has spent seventy-three years using letters to avoid being seen. Sybil Van Antwerp writes to Joan Didion, to Larry McMurtry, to her estranged daughter, to a customer service rep at a DNA company — and the architecture of all that correspondence exists, I think, so that one letter never has to be sent.
Virginia Evans's debut novel is more sophisticated than it pretends to be. The form is the argument. The form is also the trap. There's a long unsent letter running through the book that pretends to be a side plot and is actually the spine of the whole thing — and the ending complicates itself in ways the marketing is reluctant to sit with.
This isn't a takedown. It's a quietly great novel being read as a comforting one. And the gap between those two readings is where the book actually lives.
Books, taken seriously. No quick summaries.
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