The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
Virginia Evans has conducted a master class on character interiority by portraying Sybil Van Antwerp through the thoughts she sets down on paper.
Interiority is hard for an author to do well, because however analytical the character is, and Sybil Van Antwerp is as analytical and tough as you might expect of a lawyer, nobody can ever completely dissect their own character. A character has to be somewhere along the spectrum of unreliable when it comes to self knowledge. The journey into knowing oneself is the arc of many character driven books and The Correspondent is a text book version without being in any way ‘heavy’.
“Dear Mr. Watts,
Thank you for your invitation to dinner, but ‘no’ is my answer, and you’ll have no choice but to take it. I have alternative engagements on this date. Now that you mention Evansberg, everything falls into place. You should have mentioned the suit at the memorial, and then perhaps I would not have stood staring at you like a glass eyed fish. Of course I remember Evansberg, a two-year plague, and the name M. Watts on every page that came across my desk.”
By this point in the book, 17% through according to my Kindle, Sybil has already voiced contradictory views to her various correspondents, and you are aware that she is often not very understanding, especially when it comes to her children, so you will not be surprised when she does a complete U-turn and Mr. Watts succeeds in getting his dinner date.
Sybil Van Antwerp is not just any old letter writer. She writes prolifically and carefully, only using the finest notepaper and high quality fountain pens. She is intelligent and has an enviable grasp of language. It emerges that she is also prickly, needy, self-opinionated and in denial about something.
Sybil upsets some of the people she writes to. And they respond in their various ways – some telling her quite frankly where she has stepped out of line. Yet she is also very generous with the people she gets to know, giving them gifts, helping them find jobs, encouraging them to keep going and simply being there when she is needed.
Sybil writes to whoever she pleases, including famous authors. And they write back. Sybil doesn’t find this surprising. She was not a nobody in her own profession of the law, and she regards everyone else as regular humans.
She is also persistent. When the dean at her local university says she can’t audit (attend without doing coursework) classes in her faculty, Sybil writes and writes again. Eventually she sneaks into the university and accosts the woman. Does a blazing row ensue? No, they go to lunch together and become friends. Sybil has that sort of quality. People are attracted to her courage and her outspokenness.
But in her own life Sybil has had many setbacks and they all stem from one major event. What this was is something that gradually unwinds in the course of the story. It unwinds for the reader at the same rate as Sybil acknowledges that she needs to bring it into the open. This major theme is obscured and coloured by the many little subplots in the book that make up the tapestry of a life. You will need to pay attention, especially to the letter headings.
Sybil is seventy-three years old when the book begins. This fact is right in the very first letter you read. The passing of time, particularly in the final years of life is an important theme. Don’t skip those headings!
I leave you with one of my favourite pieces of Sybil-insight:
“We are all thirty in our hearts, before all the disappointment, all the ways it turned out to be so much more painful than we thought it would be…”
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