“The Correspondant” may be the ‘most recommended’ book I’ve encountered for some time.  I can’t count the number of people who have suggested I read it, including my wife’s Cambridge book club.  The combination of many recommendations, the endorsement of my wife’s book club, and its presence on the New York Times Hardcover Best Seller list for the last 35 weeks  would ordinarily have doomed a book for me and ensured it would never rise to the top of my “To Be Read” pile.  How wrong I was, and how glad I am that I succumbed to the pressure and read this book. I loved it!

Perhaps it was reading it by Lake Kezar in Maine during our summer family vacation at camp or perhaps it was its epistolary form, but I’m guessing it was primarily because it was the usual winning combination for excellent fiction—memorable and believable characters caught up in a tightly structured plot with a great beginning and ending, and all wrapped up in excellent writing.  “The Correspondent” has it all,  and I would have raced right through it if I had not set it aside with 20 pages to go so I could continue to be immersed in the story of Sybil Stone Van Antwerp, her ex-husband and boyfriends, her children and their children, her friends, and a random cast of others including the Dean of the English Department at the University of Maryland and the child of a man who she helped to send to prison when she was a lawyer.

It’s always hard to review a novel without ruining the plot, and this book is no exception.  Suffice it to say that Sybil has been a letter writer since the age of 9 and the book comprises hundreds of letters and emails from her to others that accumulated as she approached 80. Along the way we learn of her family tragedy and its impact on all of them, Sybil, her husband Daan, and her children Fiona and Bruce. I loved her interaction with Harry Landy, a teen age mathematical savant who is terribly bullied by his schoomates to the point of a suicide attempt before Sybil sails in to save him.

One of the delightful features of the book is the references that Rosalie (Sybil’s sister-in-law and best friend from childhood) and Sybil make to the books they’re reading—Didion, Patchett, du Maurier, Woolf, Sue Miller, John Williams’ wonderful novel “Stoner”, John McGahren’s “Amongst Women”, William Trevor, Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove”, and the topper of all time, my very favorite 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff.  One could do worse than adopt these as a summer’s reading list!

Adoption, DNA testing, family ties, career, loss, late life challenges and triumphs—it’s all there and meted out letter and email by letter and email.  If you, like me, have resisted reading this best seller, give it up.  Read it.  You’ll smile; you’ll cry; and most of all you’ll love spending time with Sybil and her circle.

In a late development, I have learned that a movie is being made of “The Correspondent” and Jane Fonda, that activist and always young actress from my youth, is playing Sybil. Can’t wait!