The Pulitzer Prizes were awarded today, which reminded me to recommend two good novels that I’ve recently finished. One is a short book while the other is quite long, but both are excellent and well worth reading.
First, the short one: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, her first book. It’s recent (published in 2025), short (285 small pages), and was issued by my own publisher, Penguin Random House. You can access the Amazon site by clicking on the cover image below.
It’s about the only “epistolary novel” I’ve ever read, which means it consists solely of a series of letters—written by and sent to one Sybil van Antwerp, a retired lawyer in her late seventies who lives in Annapolis, Maryland. van Antwerp is insistent that letters are the most efficient ways of expressing her thoughts and feelings, and she’ll write emails only when pressed. At this late stage of her life, she’s writing to her family (partly estranged), to an unknown troll her hates her, to her friends, and to writers like Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry, who answer her letters. (The correspondence, of course, is all made up.)
On starting the book one gets the sense of an honest, upright woman with strong feelings but also substantial empathy for others. Over the course of the correspondence, however, this image erodes as one becomes aware that Sybil has had immense trouble in her life and uses letters as a way to assuage it. As the book proceeds, her life become more cluttered, but in a good way: she takes in a troubled adolescent, gets involved with two men, and finds a long-lost relative using a DNA ancestry company. All the while she engages in writing a single continuous letter, one she never sends, to someone about whom she feels guilty.
The book is superb though not a classic: the task one faces is to figure out what Sybil is really like from her letters; and that impression changes over the course of the book. I won’t give any spoilers here, but if you’re in the mood for a relatively short and engrossing read, The Correspondent is a book you should consider.
Mating, by Norman Rush, is a much more complex and ambitious affair. It came out in 1991 (published by Granta Books and now Vintage) and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction that same year, so I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of it. Unusually, though the author is a man, the narrative comes from a woman—a strong-willed and opinionated (an unnamed) graduate student in her thirties, who abandons her work in Botswana because her field, anthropology, seems passé. Instead of doing her work, she accumulates experience, particularly with men. (This is a book about a woman’s experience written by a man, which may explain some of her authoritarian ideas and feelings. I doubt whether, given the disparity of sex between author and narrator, the book could be published today.)
The unnamed narrator becomes fixated on a male scholar, Nelson Denoon, who has founded a female-run utopian community in the Kalahari desert, a community so isolated that the narrator has to trek to it in an arduous weeklong journey through the wilderness with two donkeys. She finds Nelson in a small town with intricate rules designed to promote harmony. But the narrator can’t quite fit in, and spends a lot of time not only pondering how to act among a group of African women who jointly run the town as a commune, but also pondering her growing romance with Denoon. There is endless agonizing about the nature of their relationship, with the narrator constantly wondering whether her actions are fostering or eroding intimacy. While some might consider this a fault, it’s my experience that women analyze their relationships far more thoroughly than do men, particularly when talking to others of their own sex.
I won’t give away the plot or the ending beyond that. Although the book is nearly 500 pages long, I looked forward to reading thirty or forty pages of it each night, and again recommend it highly. At least start the book and see if the momentum carries you through it.
You can go to its Amazon page by clicking the link below. And, as always, let us know what you’re reading and what you’re liking—or not liking.
Thanks for the recommendations. I’ll check them both out!
Having enjoyed “Mating”, I subsequently decided to give us his later novel, “Subtle Bodies”, a try. It was a serious disappointment.
As I noted on Goodreads: “Written mostly in flat, declarative sentences, complemented by uninspired dialogue, ‘Subtle Bodies’ is meandering, pointless, and not very subtle. Too often it feels like a warmed over version of ‘The Big Chill’, with lots of silly puns substituting for a mostly-Motown soundtrack.”
I recently read “The Correspondent” and enjoyed it very much. I think that my age affected my appreciation of the book. I’m in my mid-70s now, and I could identify with some of what she was experiencing as she grew older.
Now, I’ll have to read “Mating.” As always, thank you for the recommendations.
I’m struggling with Faulkner’s The Bear, so I can discuss it with two friends. I am on the bear’s side.
Regarding “Mating”:
“I doubt whether, given the disparity of sex between author and narrator, the book could be published today.”
Probably not, which reflects the one of several major regressions we’ve had in our societal IQ in the last 20-30 years.
In more intelligent times, people not only understood that talented authors could put themselves in the shoes of others, even if those “others” had a different amount of melanin or produced different gametes than them…but they also considered it a sign of a well-developed sense of morality, which it is. We can’t have altruism without this theory of mind and the ability to place ourselves in the circumstances of others. This is one of the fundamental benefits of reading fiction.
But due to the virus of identity politics, which is basically a hustle that only benefits a small number of belligerent and short-sighted activists, we can no longer have books like this. Black people can only write about black people, gays only about gays, and women only about women. Turf has been claimed and is jealously protected. How enlightening for literature!
And white people, particularly white males, are stuck in a strange no-man’s land…for if they openly identified as a “proud white author” that would be a major problem. And if they tried to protect their turf by criticizing any nonwhite author for writing about “white stuff”…well that’s the end of them. They must therefore be extremely careful about what they write about and how they speak about it, which cannot have anything other than a chilling effect on literature.
So we are left with an impoverished and balkanized literary world, severely constricted by the capricious rules of identity politics.
Brian Wilson couldn’t swim. I suppose today he wouldn’t be allowed to write songs about surfing.
“Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time” by Gaia Vince.
Thanks, Gerry, for the recommendations. And thanks to everyone on this site who ever recommends books. I find this site one of the best for reliably connecting me with books that I’m glad I read.
BTW, as a PSA for anyone who is like me and gets most of their books from the library, I highly recommend you install Library Extension on your computer. It automatically tells you whether a book that is listed on Amazon or GoodReads is available in your local library and, if so, enables you to borrow or reserve the book (or put it on your wish list) with just one click. I use it all the time.
Thanks, just installed.
I really need to read The Correspondent
The Correspondent audio book is very well done. I was glad to see that book recommended here (to read). If you’re in circumstances where an audio book is appealing — give it a listen.
I’ve just finished “Great Adaptations” by Kenneth Catania. I loved it!