Are you greater than the sum of all your text messages? This year’s Women’s Prize winner can tell you

Virgina Evans’ The Correspondent has been a slow-simmer bestseller. (Photo: womensprize.com)

The novel is told through the letters and emails sent and received by Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired legal clerk in her 70s, who has arranged her days around her correspondence.

Sybil is tough, sharp, witty, and acerbic. She has had a successful career, a failed marriage, is an adopted daughter, and a parent who lost a child. Different generations come to her for aid and advice, and two men are in love with her. She doesn’t get along with her daughter, and has never healed from the hurt of why her birth mother gave her up.

If all of this sounds mawkish, it isn’t. Evans manages to look life level in the eye— a series of incidents, happy and sad, triumphant and shameful, the whole always greater than the sum of the parts.

Sybil’s letter-writing can come across a statement of strength: each snarky thought, each snarly opinion committed to paper, to permanence and posterity. But over the pages, the book reveals that articulation can be insulation, that her precise, well-reasoned-out sentences are a cry of help against the perils and promises of spontaneity.

An indefatigable correspondent for over 70 years, Sybil has kept her most difficult conversations unsent. Her vulnerability in these letters make for a touching contrast with the self-assured missives she sends out into the world. While she has documented her life meticulously, some of her loved ones eventually find answers and acceptance in what she was too ashamed to reveal.

On Reddit, I saw many comments saying Sybil was unbearable. Her reaction to accidentally running over a cat came in for particular censure. Evans is kinder and wiser than that. Sybil’s struggles and triumphs, against herself more than anyone else, remind us that we are more than one unguarded reaction, better than one cancellable opinion, and that we are never too old to change.

The novel’s form of choice, an epistolatory narration, can be tricky. There is only so much momentum you can convey in letters being written after the action has taken place. But Evans, with the distinct tones of all the letter writers, with skillful variation of venues and subplots, keeps the book pacey.

The book’s greatest strength is its empathy. Sybil’s pride and prejudices, the raw grief and guilt she has carried for over four decades since her 8-year-old son died, her ability to cut through faff, her kindness and resourcefulness make for a rich picture of the extraordinariness of an ordinary life. A kind eye can imbue the mundane with all the magnificence it deserves, and Evans manages to highlight Sybil’s tenacity and little heroisms without drama.

Also refreshing is the book’s emphasis on female friendships. Through all Sybil’s crises, from her ex-husband’s terminal diagnosis to garden club politics, her friends cheer her along, send her books, forgive her rudeness, and help her forgive herself.

There are some parts that jar. A section about a stalker seems tacked on only to tick the box of showing Sybil the lawyer in her professional setting. And the book resorts to the popular ploy of setting the action 20 years ago, to avoid commenting on recent politics and to cash in on the nostalgia of the early 2000s.
But much like people, books need not be perfect to be endearing. If you like cosy, wise, reflective books about everyday life, read The Correspondent, and maybe write to a friend about it.

See you on July 31,

Yours Literary,

Yashee

yashee.s@indianexpress.com

P.S: If you love books, write to me with what work I should discuss next. If you are not a reader of novels, follow along, and maybe you will begin to delight in the wonder and wisdom, the practical value, and the sheer joy of fiction.