The Correspondent

I’d had this much-lauded epistolary novel on reserve for many months with my library before becoming available. As its plot (or lack of) is well covered elsewhere with nearly 85,000 starred reviews and well over half-a-million ratings on Goodreads alone, my opinion hardly matters, although I notice there are more than 50,000 people there who feel somewhat the same as I do.
 
Everyone is aware of the decline in the art of letter-writing so there’s a note of nostalgia about this book, and thus the need to make Sybil, the protagonist, a woman in her seventies. We learn some of the reasons why she’s become a letter writer rather than a face-to-face communicator and one can understand this to some extent. However, it still doesn’t make her a particularly likeable character.
 
Sybil is opinionated, kinder towards strangers than her own family. Her overwrought and righteous letters and those that she receives all seem to have a similar tone, with younger individuals often as precise in their grammar and style which isn’t close to modern reality. A transcription of SMS texts would make the other correspondents seem much more authentic for the 21st Century.
 
Another irritation is how every piece of correspondence begins with the address blocked to the left which is how business communications are created on a keyboard and you wouldn’t address handwritten letters to your nearest and dearest in that style. Presumably this is an editing device to assist the reader, but once you are familiar with the cast of characters, is superfluous. (And why does nearly every missive suffer from having a PS, i.e. postscript?)
 
Elitism and politically correct inclusivity dominate this novel, with far too many themes packed into Sybil’s existence. Perhaps this is a deliberate decision to try and appeal to the widest range of readers who can all find some aspect with which to identify. There’s the obligatory gay son, a teenager with ADHD or similar, adoption and a DNA mystery, family dysfunction, racism, anti-immigration, feminist discrimination and sexual harassment in academia, the Holocaust, overwhelming grief and various deaths (including that of a cat), encroaching blindness, other disabilities and dementia, IVF problems, infidelity, divorce, stalking and threats, even the election of Trump. The icing on the cake is the far-fetched scenario of an irascible, decrepit and not particularly loveable woman having to decide between two men who bizarrely seem to find her attractive. All this without that other dubious pretentiousness involving book reading and letters to, and occasionally from, famous authors that hints at influential friends in the world of literature. Perhaps therein lies a clue as to how this managed to get voted the best book in this year's Women's Prize for Fiction.

An underwhelming experience.
 
Two stars
 
 
amazon.com
 
amazon.co.uk
 
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