Down to the Last Letter

I was at a bar with booksellers a couple of months ago when someone used me as an experiment: “Have you read The Correspondent?,” she asked me. I said I hadn’t. She asked the bookseller next to me the same question and she quickly and enthusiastically replied that she had. Our interrogator turned to her friend as though she had just settled a bet. “You see?,” she huffed. “Every woman in this room has read The Correspondent, and every man in the room hasn’t even heard of it.” Reader, I took that personally. That night, I fired up my Libby app and queued up the audiobook version of The Correspondent. A couple months later, it finally arrived in my inbox and then I spent two days squeezing in as much listening time as is humanly possible. Virginia Evans’s runaway bestseller of an epistolary novel is literary fiction in the style of Richard Russo and Ann Patchett, big-hearted and broad and accessible. It tells the story of Sybil Van Antwerp, a fiercely independent elderly woman who maintains correspondence with a number of people while also writing too-friendly letters to authors of books she admires. It’s got a lot to say about aging and forgiveness and regrets. If you prefer your literary fiction to be ambiguous and subtle, this isn’t for you. This is a book of BIG SWINGS, the kind of on-the-nose sweeping storytelling that used to reliably win the Pulitzer Prize in the early 2000s. I’m a sucker for that kind of storytelling, especially in the summer, and so it spoke right to me—despite its somewhat fat-fingered handling of race and gender and class. (If your main character is a rich old straight white lady and you spend most of the book inside her perspective, you’re not gonna get the most enlightened observations about the world.) And I definitely want to recommend the audiobook, if you’re into that kind of thing. It’s read by a full cast, and the collage of those voices working together to fill out Sybil’s life lend a nice resonance to the epistolary format. I can’t recommend this enough if you’re the sort of person who likes to bring a populist literary novel with you on vacation—especially if you’re one of the millions of men who, according to at least one Seattle bookseller, has never heard of the damn book.