The Correspondence

by Evelin Sullivan

Alex Merry, star of stage and screen, died a tragic and untimely death in 1988. Clearly, no one would be better suited to write his biography than George Fowler, his long-time friend. Fowler might be an avant-garde writer known only in literary circles, but who knew Merry better than he? Fowler's account, however, is no standard biography. Of course he writes about all the women who passed through Alex's tumultuous love life, and his rise to fame. But we also learn about George Fowler and his own struggle as a writer. And in the course of the telling, we discover more and more about the complex, intimate relationship between George and Alex - a relationship that speaks movingly about the true nature of friendship, of love, and their consequences. Intertwined in the narrative is the fictitious correspondence which the two friends kept up for over twenty years, playfully recasting the facts of their lives as coded truths. In the letters, Alex plays the self-important adventurer, while in real life the former philanderer falls tragically in love. George takes on the bitingly satirical persona of an alienated poet, tormented by solitude and the failure of creativity. During the course of the novel the characters' motives are progressively unmasked, and the reader is led to consider just how much we can ever know about one another, or about ourselves. Heartbreaking, but also hilariously funny, The Correspondence is a brilliant portrayal of obsession, the peculiarities of romantic and sexual attraction, and the madness of love, written by a masterful and remarkably inventive storyteller.

324 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1993

About the author

Born 1947.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Steven Moore qualifies his epic Shandian Spawn list with "That list, you’ve probably noticed, is a total sausage fest; the daughters of Tristram Shandy might include..." and continues with
Djuna Barnes’s Ryder,
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,
Brigid Brophy’s In Transit,*
Julieta Campos’s Fear of Losing Eurydice,*
Gabrielle Burton’s Heartbreak Hotel,*
Jaimy Gordon’s Shamp of the City-Solo,
Janice Galloway’s Trick Is to Keep Breathing (‘This book resembles Tristram Shandy as rewritten by Sylvia Plath’ --NYTBR),
Sarah Schulman’s Empathy,
Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries,
Helen DeWitt’s Last Samurai,*
Heather Woodbury’s What Ever,
Cintra Wilson’s Colors Insulting to Nature,
Vanessa Place’s La Medusa,*
Nicola Barker’s Darkmans,
Emilie Autumn’s Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls,
Carol Hart’s History of the Novel in Ants,
Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?,
certain novels by Kathy Acker,*
Christine Brooke-Rose,*
Rikki Ducornet,*
Thalia Field,*
Xiaolu Guo,
Carole Maso,*
Ali Smith,* and
Aritha Van Herk,
and some formally innovative YA novels by the likes of
Susie Day,
E. Lockhart, and
Lauren Myracle
;; and explains the gender'd division of the list with "But Sterne’s cocktail of comic erudition, slap-and-tickle sexuality, bittersweet sentimentalism, and achronological form doesn’t seem to attract many women writers -- or women readers, according to Professor Elizabeth Terries. She says in her career she’s taught Tristram Shandy to nearly 500 female students, and estimates ‘not more than twenty enjoyed reading Sterne’s work or will ever return to it.’”

Now, those of us intimately familiar with the Sterne nature of fiction, this central branch of our literary history, recognize that "comic erudition, slap-and-tickle sexuality, bittersweet sentimentalism, and achronological form" doesn't fully articulate what it is about the Shandian that makes it peculiarly Shandian. And so but in addition to Moore's list of distaff Shandians, let me add this, The Correspondence by Evelin Sullivan, and please to plead with you (and Professor Terries' 500 female students!!) to read it right after you're dissatisfied with something--anything--about Tristram Shandy. What a delight!!!

[also recommended to all of you sick of mad=love stories]



* just a score=keeping for my own sake. Several more on the tbr.