Lying to Ourselves and Petitioning the Absent - Whatever Happened to the Epistolary Novel?
Rewind to 2007 and picture an American woman, looking partially - if you squint - like her dust-jacket photograph, sitting in a dingy room on the ground floor of a Barbican-style university complex. A strip light flickers above. The view out the window is slate-grey brick. She waits to answer queries about her novel from the students now assembling themselves, silent with awe, corralling notepads, pens and Dictaphones. This woman has written what must rank as the most important epistolary novel of recent times and she is there, of course, because We Need to Talk about Kevin.
Lionel Shriver is quick to rubbish the epistolary nature of her 2005 Orange Prize-winning novel. However, it's not long before she's praising the techniques appropriated for the book, the ‘purposive sense of communication to the reader’, an intimacy ‘like reading someone's mind, getting into the characters interior’. She is willing herself round, even if she has a problem with, I suspect, the pigeonholing, the being part of a group, a trend.
Because, for a brief time, the epistolary novel was a reinvigorated genre, with many contemporary authors, including big-hitters such as William Boyd, J M Coetzee, Michael Frayn and John Updike, structuring their works from documents, be they diary, newspaper or good old-fashioned postal correspondence. I can’t think of many epistolary novels since Andy Weir’s The Martian, written as a collection of video journal entries and first published in 2011, which have similarly captured the mainstream. The trail goes cold.
That's not to say the brief resurgence in the epistolary format at the end of the noughties happened in complete isolation. Over the previous 200 years several memorable epistolary works had emerged, notably Turgenev’s Superfluous Man, Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody, Stoker's Dracula, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Walker’s The Color Purple. The diary remains a staple for children's authors too (and adult fiction such as Bridget Jones's Diary owes as much to Sue Townsend as it does Jane Austen), with Jeff Kinney’s perennial Wimpy Kid series spawning hundreds of similar titles. But, in terms of adult literature, the epistolary book is no longer king.
When Samuel Richardson wrote his phenomenal bestsellers Pamela and Clarissa in 1740 and 1749 respectively, he did so with little prior understanding of what a novel constitutes and was merely structuring a fiction out of contemporary methods of communication. Both these books (Clarissa still being the longest novel ever written in the English language) used letters to tell their stories and spawned a literary style that was as popular in the eighteenth century as, arguably, reality TV is today.
In my research, I came across over 30 references to Richardson’s famous dictum arguing he was, in using the epistolary format, writing ‘to the moment’, echoed years later by Shriver’s acknowledgement that letters allow readers greater access to a character’s immediate thoughts. In Pamela, the protagonist’s inner feelings were recorded almost simultaneously with her activities (this was later ridiculed in Henry Fielding Shamela, in which the lascivious female character pauses to update her narrative in the unlikeliest of circumstances) and she writes two kinds of letters. At the novel’s start, while debating how long to stay on at Mr. B's after his mother's death, she writes epistles to her parents recounting her assorted moral quandaries and inviting their counsel. After Mr. B incarcerates her in his house, she persists in writing to her parents, despite being unsure whether or not her parents will ever receive them. This is precisely the case with We Need To Talk About Kevin, since Eva continues to write to her husband, Franklin, long after he has been (spoiler alert:) skewered through the throat by a bolt from her son's crossbow, and The Martian, as Mark Watney has no idea whether NASA will pick up his reports before his death, if at all.
Sending letters to dead people is not as daft as it sounds. A major concern for Sarah Worth in John Updike’s ‘S.’: a novel is that her writing could be intercepted. She writes, ‘I shouldn't be putting all this into a letter… henchpeople have the mail read, coming in or out.’ No such danger when the postal system is eschewed and the letters pile up in a shoebox under the bed.
Letters in novels differ significantly from a standard first-person narrative, not just due to the reliability of the narrator, but also the nature of the intended recipient or recipients. In We Need To Talk About Kevin, Eva is still desperately trying to prove her Innocence to her husband, attempting to remove a slowly-gnawing accountability. Lionel Shriver recognises that ‘we want to look hard into ourselves, to find that we are not at fault. It's not human nature to blame ourselves.’
A need to communicate with someone is frequently married with a desire to come out on top. The writer writes for him or herself, despite the preposition ‘To…’ at the letter’s head. Tim Parks plays with this idea in Family Planning. When Mr and Mrs Baldwin return from the Middle East with Raymond, their schizophrenic eldest, there is a swift exchange of letters amongst the younger siblings. Raymond joins in the correspondence with death threats and pornographic notes. No one listens to anyone else and the family’s monologues, ultimately, aren't much different from Raymond’s own delusions.
If the home is a rich vein of controversy and bickering, then so too is the workplace. And what better way to illustrate the insincerity, bitchiness and backstabbing of modern office politics than through the ubiquitous email?
I would suggest that the epistolary bubble burst back when the email stopped seeming novel. The chances are that a cursory glance over the 3 for 2 tables in Waterstones fifteen years ago would have revealed Carl Steadman’s Two Solitudes, Rob Wittig’s Blue Company, Cecelia Ahern’s Where Rainbows End and Rosie Rushton and Nina Schindler’s PS. He's Mine! For a brief moment, authors fell over themselves to capture this new medium in print, before the chore of forwarding, CC’ing and blind copying became everybody’s 9 to 5.
Matt Beaumont’s e. consists entirely of email correspondence written between the employees of an advertising agency and several business partners. A huge cast of characters squander their time and energy on absurd sub-plots involving exploding breast implants, ladyboys and love affairs, a catalogue of human weaknesses which stalls progress and ultimately thwarts success. The majority of the characters spend the duration of the novel vindicating their appalling actions, firing and sniping at will to save their own blameless skins. The CEO is astonishingly computer illiterate and inadvertently sends copies of his emails to the Helsinki office, exposing the supposedly private correspondence to the wider world and, in essence, doing what the epistolary novel has always done by transforming the personal into common knowledge and playing with notions of interception.
The immateriality of the email is associated with affective qualities such as impermanence and impersonality. Emails are not destined for rereading. There's something personal about a handwritten letter that you don't get with an email and, unless you print it out, you've got no lasting record of it. But it's arguably this transience and impersonality that held the secret to e.’s comedy, and it's interesting that the majority of email novels were of this genre. They didn’t play with the Big Idea, nor uphold intellectual respectability or moralise like the virtuous epistolary fictions of old.
People don’t write letters anymore. They blog instead of writing diaries. It’s no wonder modern authors are increasingly ignoring letter-writing formats. And that’s a shame, because such techniques add a fun element of verisimilitude to fiction by demonstrating contradictory viewpoints without recourse to an omniscient narrator. The epistolary novel is not in vogue, perhaps, because we are all so busy, living a life that doesn’t allow for letter-writing any longer. It wouldn’t be taken seriously in a modern novel, since it doesn’t convincingly mimic the workings of real-life.
When I was writing Blame, I needed to find a persuasive voice for an eleven-year-old boy living in 1989. Utilising his diary entries seemed the obvious choice. Had that book been set in 2020, I doubt I would have used such a device. I probably would have chosen to include his online Minecraft chat, for example. To my mind that is a shame, in a literary sense. Handwriting functions as a signifier of presence, and letter-writers easily evoke propinquity and intimacy by this allusion to the body, and the epistle’s very creation.
I’d like to believe my objections gain some credence upon reading certain sections of Martin Amis' Yellow Dog:
as 4 my face: my i’s r green (tho not with n v!). my hair is s&y & ‘flyaway’. men have a habit of saying th@ i am blessed with a submissive & yielding manner, in an old-fashioned way: quintessentially femi9.
I don’t think I could stomach a novel constructed entirely from this kind of textspeak, which the American author John Crowley called ‘abbreviations and slovenly shortcuts’, and I struggled with Londonstani’s tiring attempts to do a similar thing.
But the epistolary novel, having a long and storied tradition in English literature, and irrespective of its current fallowness, will always evolve with our methods of communication. Just as the development of the postal system led to the epistolary novel’s heyday (60% of all novels were of an epistolary nature in 1780) so the ubiquity of the email influenced literature for a time.
It fell out of favour, I would argue, because of its fatal flaw.
‘An email novel’, says John Crowley, ‘has to almost combine the qualities of talk and writing, since they are usually written so quickly and thoughtlessly, and replied to so instantly. Writing the letters in an epistolary novel always meant distinguishing among a number of correspondents by their style - an email novel has to be thought of almost as creating character through dialogue. On the other hand I think it might be boring to read a whole novel made of email only. It would take a master to make it come alive. But one advantage would be immediacy - older epistolary novels could only proceed when a character had space and leisure to write a letter, now you can write instantly.’
All of which takes us nicely back to Richardson's ‘writing for the moment’ and why the epistolary format made its brief renaissance, in the days when wireless technology first swept the globe and unproofed emails were flung across cyberspace in a joyful instant.
I love epistolary fiction. I love that a defining attribute of its discourse is the dance between absence and presence: communicating via the letter form signals the recipient’s absence and, simultaneously, endeavours to bridge that gap, hence the tradition, in fiction, of writing to dead people and lovers, fantasising about bodily proximity or presence, however impossible. But it's a double-edged sword. The author Elizabeth Barrett Browning remarks to one of her closest epistolary friends: ‘thanks warmest and truest, my dearest Miss Mitford, for your delightful letter, which is certainly delightful, as it made me feel just as if I was sitting face-to-face to you, hearing you talk.’ But without a response, the letter writer is talking to him or herself, furthering the idea of the barking mad or unreliable voice, and the whole enterprise takes on the melancholy poignancy of disembodiment. The writer is lying to themselves, by petitioning the absent.
Lionel Shriver, behind her desk in the dingy, flickering ground-floor classroom, is quick to agree on this point. Her ‘confessional novel’ is still Eva’s ‘side of things’ and the shift away from personal accountability she sees reflected culturally. As a nation moving away from an all-powerful God, perhaps we trust storytellers, the pullers of strings, less than before. These unreliable narrators are all we have, and they write to justify.
We want to prove to others how special, how correct, we are. And we do so out of habit. Lionel Shriver's Eva says, ‘Dear Franklin, I'm unsure why one trifling incident this afternoon has moved me to write to you. But since we've been separate, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in separate backyards.’ We are islands, but we have an inbuilt need to do something with our capacity for communication.
Which is why the epistolary novel has always threatened its resurgence, despite literary fashions and favours, and will, one day soon, be born again. On that day, a new and immediate voice will refresh and rejuvenate the epistolary novel and bring the absent that little bit closer, open doors for a modern language and modern idioms, and give new authors scope for private justification and embellishments, beamed out across the world under the disguise of truth.
Dear reader, I can hardly wait.
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