'The Correspondent' is an epistolary novel, but can letters tell the whole story?
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What makes *The Correspondent* a runaway hit and how does its epistolary format work?
Hey, it's MPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. I was at the park the other day and I saw someone with a copy of the novel The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. It was a brand new copy, fresh from the bookstore a few blocks up. I chatted her up about it, and it was for her book club, and she was excited to dig into it. I suspect she's not alone in her enthusiasm. I'd guess that more than a few of you have read it. For a book that came out almost a year ago now, it's become kind of a runaway history. hit nobody in the publishing industry saw coming. If you don't know, it's about a woman in her seventies and it's told through the letters she writes to her friends, to strangers and loved ones. Author Virginia Evans talks to here and now's Robin Young about the book's success and what it's done for the letter writing industry after the break.
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I know when the news goes into overload, I find refuge with good books, so a few minutes now on arguably the most popular novel in the country. It's the top fiction bestseller in the New York Times, the most requested book at the Chicago Public Library. The Arizona Republic lists it as one of the most anticipated books of twenty twenty six. But the correspondent by Virginia Evans came out almost a year ago. It's spread. Spreading by people asking, as two of the book's characters do, what are you reading? That's the way they've ended letters to each other since childhood, and it's part of a trove of letters that tell this story, exchanges between seventy something Sibyl Van Antwerp and her garden club, a customer service rep, or the suicidal son of a colleague.
Famous authors like Joan Didion and Anne Patchet, all of whom she befriends in letters she's been writing since childhood on perfect stationery with perfect pens are But an imperfect world is pressing in on her. We see that Sybil's controlled prose, as good as some of the authors she writes to, is covering a terrible grief as well as guilt over the loss of a child. As the real Anne Patchett writes about the correspondent, it's a book about how one woman changes at a point where change seems impossible. My college roommate couldn't put the correspondent down, that's when I picked it up. It is remarkably Virginia Evans' debut novel. Virginia, congratulations. Thank you so much. And what has it been like to see Sybil Van Antwerp so
embraced? I mean she's just soaring, isn't she, all over the I mean I do think of her kind of as a real person and it has been the surprise of a lifetime. You publish a novel and you've never published a novel before and my expectation was that it would come out and we would sell some copies and that would be enough. Here we are sort of selling and selling and selling for more copies than I ever imagined we would sell. Because everybody's saying,
What are you reading? And this is it. Look, who who would you say Sybil is?
Oh well I would say Sybil is a woman who has lived with grief for a long time and disappointment, but that's not all that she is. She's funny and she's very smart and she's very kind and she's a little misguided at times. And she has a
kind of a quaint way of speaking in one case she's saying it's been a difficult year, but even still one must, for respect of old Langside, salute each annum with respect and ownership. I mean there's just this it's almost like a uh um an image of how an older woman might speak on masterpiece theater. Mm-hmm.
I think, you know, the way Sybil curates her communication in letters is not, I imagine, necessarily how she speaks.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What makes *The Correspondent* a runaway hit and how does its epistolary format work?
0:02–5:32
2
How did Virginia Evans react to the unexpected commercial success of her debut novel?
5:32–9:05
3
Who is Sybil Van Antwerp and what does her character reveal about grief and memory?
9:05–11:21
4
Why does Evans say the letters in the novel feel both perfect and edited?
11:21–13:26
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from NPR's Book of the Day
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