Writers Who Kill

Epistolary Novels on my Bookshelf

Margaret S. Hamilton

 

I spent the month of January recovering from an illness, sitting in the winter sun reading tattered paperbacks from my all-time favorites shelf.

 

I first discovered epistolary novels—those written in the form of letters—when I read Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase. I was fascinated how Kaufman built her story about the adventures of a young and inexperienced teacher, Sylvia Barrett, at a New York City public high school, using classroom dialogue, student papers, memos in her faculty mailbox, and the contents of the classroom suggestion box to portray a chaotic high school environment. Sylvia’s letters to her college friend, Ellen, and to her faculty mentor, Bea Schachter, reveal her wry gallows humor. Sylvia ponders a tough decision--to continue teaching at Calvin Coolidge HS or accept a position at the posh Willowdale Academy, where every student has a desk, a textbook, and a desire to learn. Mimeographed memos in the sixties are now floods of e-mails, but school bureaucracy remains the same, or perhaps worse, with the implementation of a maze of rules, regulations, and standardized tests.

 

 

I paged through Beverly Cleary’s Dear Mr. Henshaw, written in the form of letters from twelve-year old Leigh Botts to his favorite author, Mr. Henshaw. Leigh replies to Mr. Henshaw’s questions, and with Henshaw’s encouragement, makes the transition to writing his own journal entries in the form of letters addressed to his mentor. Leigh takes Henshaw’s directive for characters to solve a problem or change in some way and applies it to himself and a problem he’s having at school--someone is stealing food from his lunchbox. With the help of a kindly clerk at the local hardware store, Leigh invents a lunchbox alarm. For years, as an elementary school “writing mom,” I used the writing prompts from Cleary’s book in my own lessons.

 

I wish I had read Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower before my older kids started high school. It would have helped me appreciate the tumult of everyday life, both in the classroom and after school. Set in the early nineties, Charlie writes letters about his freshman year experiences to an unnamed friend. Charlie is traumatized when his childhood friend commits suicide. He is befriended by two older student-mentors, and finds himself in situations involving sex, drugs, and alcohol. At the end of the school year, Charlie is hospitalized for mental health treatment after he acknowledges his childhood sexual abuse by a relative. Charlie’s writing is extraordinary for a fourteen- year-old; the obstacles he tries to overcome ring true.

 

Before my last trip to London, I re-read Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road, a collection of letters Hanff wrote to Marks and Company, a London used book store, from 1949 to 1969, with replies from staff member Frank Doel. Hanff was a struggling New York City playwright and screenwriter with an eclectic taste in books, Doel a reserved book seller. Hanff became aware of stringent food rationing in England, and sent the shop staff food parcels, holiday greetings, and snapshots. Doel sent her beautifully bound books and made suggestions for future acquisitions. After twenty years of correspondence, Hanff learns that Frank Doel, her longtime correspondent and friend, has died. In subsequent books, she visits London and meet Frank’s family and the shop staff. When I visited London, I walked up Charing Cross Road from Trafalgar Square and found the approximate location of the bookshop, though it’s no longer there.

And finally, Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette. Bernadette Fox’s story is told through the eyes of her fourteen-year-old daughter, Bee, supplemented by Bernadette’s e-mails to her virtual assistant in India, electronic missives from the PTA, e-mails between two women who are feuding with her, letters from her husband to a psychiatrist concerning her, and correspondence and a retrospective architectural journal article about Bernadette, a noted young architect and MacArthur Award winner.  Bernadette disappears, presumably overboard, from an Antarctica cruise ship. Bee and her father make the same trip, Bee convinced that her mother is still in Antarctica.

Bee is a good kid, bright, close to her mother and fiercely protective of her. The “normal” of Bee’s life includes invasive blackberry vines growing through the floorboards of her home. Her mother knows all the lyrics to the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, spends her days on her computer in the Airstream, “Petit Trianon,” in the backyard, and orders take-out food for dinner every night. Bernadette eventually confesses to Bee that she “never considered (herself) a great architect, (but) more of a creative problem solver with good taste and a soft spot for logistical nightmares,” which includes the current state of her life.

After a fifteen-year hiatus from architecture, Bernadette discovers an opportunity in Antarctica for a new project, designing and building a replacement South Pole station, with all construction materials flown in from the States. Because the South Pole is on a shifting ice sheet, Bernadette’s proposed building “would have to be a wind-powered crab-walking igloo.”

We know Bernadette will succeed, not only as an architect and construction manager, but as a mother and wife, in a new Seattle home free of wild blackberry vines.

I’m back at work at the kitchen table, having absorbed the magic of novels written as letters, wondering how I can carry the technique forward into my own writing. Letters and e-mails reveal much about a character, but also slow a narrative to a crawl.

Readers and writers, what is your favorite epistolary novel or short story?