Sitting alone in her Baltimore home, 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp communicates with the world primarily through letters, the kind you put in envelopes and mail. This novel consists exclusively of her letters to and from friends, family, public figures she admires, and others she has, as my Baltimore mother used to say, a bone to pick with.
I was initially skeptical, as was at least one other person in my book club, that a collection of letters could amount to a novel worthy of the effusive praise this one has earned. Every book club I know is reading it. I’ve read other epistolary novels, and they’re okay but not as good as a traditional novel in my opinion. This one is.
First of all, Sybil fascinates me. She’s a complicated woman. Acerbic and prickly she may be, but as a retired lawyer she values words and enjoys living alone. The letters constitute a protective covering, allowing her to communicate with others while maintaining strict control over her privacy. At the same time, she is writing letters to an unnamed recipient that are never sent, and these reveal what she is really thinking.
Second, unlikely as it may sound, her quiet life whips up enough tension and suspense to make the reader not want to look away for a second. Not only are Sybil’s health and eyesight beginning to fail, not only does she long to heal the rifts in her relationship with her two children, but suddenly the world is more with her than she expected. A surprising friendship with a neighbor, Theodore Lübeck, upsets her solitude, as does a brash Texan with romance on his mind.
Events accelerate. She is asked to be responsible for a child and to heal her relationship with her ex-husband. A stalker sends her threatening letters. Regrets about her past coldness to others pile up. Members of my book club couldn’t stop reading. We loved all the humor and human interest. Also, being based in Baltimore, we appreciated the local settings and all the literary references. Sybil is a reader like us!
We also praised the author’s writerly skills. The order of the letters is nicely balanced between recipients to show different sides of Sybil’s character, and arranged in such a way that they keep us waiting and wondering about the outcome of a particular exchange for just the right amount of time, i.e., we remained interested without being annoyed. Also, I thought the unsent letters a masterful solution to the need to show her inner thoughts.
A few members complained that some of the story lines had unrealistic, “Pollyanna-ish” endings. I don’t disagree. At the same time, I think the author did a good job of portraying a woman contemplating the end of her life and trying to come to terms with her regrets, guilt, and failures over the course of her life.
Some of us went out and bought stationery and plan to write some real letters. We talked about how much value we have found in reading collections of letters and how biographers rely on them. We wondered what will happen in the future, since almost no one writes letters anymore. Our emails and texts seem both permanent and ephemeral. In the future, will anyone publish collections of emails, or will that sense of everyday life be lost?
When was the last time you wrote a letter to someone, not an email or text, but a physical letter?