The Correspondent
Virginia Evans builds an entire life out of letters in The Correspondent, a tender, slow-burning epistolary novel about Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer who writes her way toward an old wound she's never let close. It's quiet, literate, and, by the last page, devastating.
From the review
Sybil Van Antwerp writes letters the way other people pray. Most mornings she sits down with her pen and takes on the world: her brother, her oldest friend, a stubborn university administrator who won't let her audit a class, even the authors whose books she's just finished and now wants to argue with. The whole novel runs this way, through the letters she sends and the replies that come back, and the striking thing is how fully a person assembles in the gaps. You don't learn who Sybil is from a narrator. You learn it from the distance between how she writes to her brother and how she writes to a stranger she's decided to put in her place. That's a real craft achievement. Evans trusts the form to do the work of characterization, and it does, though the all-letters approach carries a built-in cost. Nobody writes a letter in the heat of the moment, and a few stretches lean on coincidence to keep the correspondence moving.
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