I waited several months to get my turn with this novel after putting in a request at the library in the early Fall; it's been that much in demand since its April 2025 publication. The Correspondent has been called the sleeper hit of 2025.
The novel is structured as a series of letters and emails between protagonist Sybil and a number of people in her personal orbit, as well as a few well known authors she did not know personally including McMurtry and Joan Didion. In the first three quarters of the book there doesn't seem to be much that is remarkable about this woman's life: Though it has its difficulties and profound sorrows, it is also a fortunate and rather insulated life.
Sybil has always loved to write and receive letters. In retirement this inclination sharpens as she begins to devote several mornings a week to correspondence with a number of people. Curiously though, many of her letters ramble on and on with way too much information. The woman should have kept a diary to record some of this stuff rather than pour it so narcissistically into letters. The purpose of this unfiltered tedium of course is to establish who Sybil is, as well as to further the novel's trajectory. Still, I read with skepticism; she seems to lay bare her soul unnecessarily in so many of her letters, as do most of the people who write back to her. She even does this in emails exchanged with a customer service rep, crossing boundaries that eventually get the employee fired. So many of her letters to peripheral acquaintances are full of irrelevant detail. For a letter writer as practiced as Sybil is, this seems odd. Who really does that with everyone they know, whether close or not?
On the other hand the intimate confidences exchanged with her lifelong friend Rosalie who lives in another city are genuine and beautifully expressed, as are letters to and from her brother. I love that she and Rosalie end every letter with "I'm reading [ _________.] What are you reading?"
A lot of people love Sybil. But she isn't likeable. Her daughter doesn't even like her. She comes across as entitled, closed-minded, defensive, thoughtless, pushy - a regular Karen, to use a pejorative label from the current vernacular. When she meets an obstacle, rather than considering others' positions or points of view, she just keeps pushing to get her way. Yet she always does the "correct" thing when a social situation calls for it. She has superficially good manners, but thoughtfulness, sympathy, and empathy are not Sybil's first instincts. I didn't like this woman, yet after a few pages the book started to embed hooks in me such that I looked forward to returning to it each time I had to put it down.
Given these complaints, what hooked me once I'd begun this book? Beautiful prose, for one thing - even in inappropriately rambling letters. And: other people's stories that unfold in ongoing correspondence. Sybil's correspondence is a conduit to some emotionally haunting human interest stories. The Correspondent felt at times like a de facto collection of riveting short stories parsed out bit by bit in the letters Sybil received. These stories-within-a-story kept me plugged in throughout.
Yet toward the end of the book, at last I found Sybil's own story satisfying. In the last decade of her life she begins to soften and open herself up less narcissistically and more genuinely. She becomes likeable - but only after being confronted in various ways with her own rigid, reflexive thoughtlessness and made to see the sometimes devastating effects on others of her decisions and behaviors. Her transition is evident in her writing. After she begins to let down her guard, life gets bigger and very interesting, presenting her with the above referenced miracles.
I suspect each reader won over by The Correspondent connects a bit of their own experience to the emotionally resonant universal themes woven into it. Altogether a satisfying novel worth the wait.
-Marianne W.
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