switterbug (Betsey)'s Reviews > The Correspondent

Sybil Van Antwerp is the correspondent, a blunt, arch septuagenarian living alone in Annapolis, writing letters at her desk to family, friends, and celebrated authors like Joan Didion and Kazuo Ishiguro. Moreover, she writes to personnel at a DNA lab (Sybil was adopted, and she’s ambivalent about the biological search), editors of newspapers, a struggling kid, her garden club, and a Dean of English of a university that won’t let her audit a class. Even at age 73, Sybil has some growing to do; she’s quick to give advice and analyze others, but she can also be cagey and stubborn and even avoidant about her own thorny issues.

Epistolary novels unfold in small reveals. Sybil is also sly--to give up secrets by her pen while still tucking them away under layers of onionskin. This novel is intimate and telling. I was immediately drawn into Sybil’s life—all the missives were either to or from her, and each one a joy to read.

Sybil is a mother and grandmother—a divorced, retired attorney and former Chief clerk for a successful judge, a keen reader of literature, and ardent gardener. Her daughter, Fiona, is an architect, living in Sydney. We hear Sybil’s feelings rather pointedly about that long-distance daughter. The friction is apparent in Sybil’s letters to her best friend, Rosalie. She pulls no punches when it comes to expressing her feelings and opinions toward others. She gets along fine with her son, Bruce.

Daan, her ex-husband, is Belgian, and he returned to Bruges after the divorce (by the way, do visit Bruges, it is lovely!!!!). Early on, we learn that Sybil and Daan had a son, Gilbert, who died as a young boy. Sybil’s scrappiness about other subjects doesn’t extend to Gil; it is evident that she hides her deepest moments of anguish under her nostalgic memories. I sensed a stabbing of unresolved pain, a nondisclosure threatening to unravel her tightly knitted history.

Every word that Sybil writes (mostly in written letters, a few necessary emails) is germane to the secrets and falsehoods that she is itching to unburden herself from, at least that’s my take on it. Persnickety and persistent, Sybil is alternately shrewd and naïve, sometimes both at once! She also refuses to travel, even to visit Fiona. Suffering from an unnamed disease, Sybil knows that she will inevitably go blind. She only shares that with a few select people, but her nuclear family is unaware.

I read this book in two days, I was so absorbed. A little suspense is thrown in when Sybil receives menacing letters from an anonymous writer and we also read letters she writes to an unknown source (not difficult to figure out). The themes are both of solace and isolation, family and grief, and, perhaps my favorite, healing through literature.

Writing to Larry McMurtry after reading Lonesome Dove for the third time. “I am an old woman and my life has been some strange balance of miraculous and mundane.” Regarding the ending of LD and the bitter disappointment of the characters: “What I had seen those years ago as a lack of mercy became to me a presence of… courage—to hurt them! To leave them in dismay! It was courageous because it was unbearable but it was true…” At the end, I held my heart in my hands.

Virginia Evans, may I write you a letter?