Review of Correspondence Course

Review by Roger Brunyate (Amazon Top500 reviewer)
of Correspondence Course: The Bathsua Project 

The Year of Magical Communication

On June 22, 2002, Dee Young writes an eMail to her husband Dan, the first of a long series of letters and other documents that make up this unusual book. The reader soon ignores the mechanics, and this rhythm of casual communication, short notes dashed off at all hours of the day or night, becomes quite natural, and very much in the moment. In the moment, too, are her references to the outside world -- the legacy of 9/11, the Beltway Sniper, the run-up to war in Iraq -- to anchor the correspondence in reality. Which is necessary, since it soon becomes clear that Dan is dead, and the eMails are Dee's way of conjuring herself through grief.

Dee's magical thinking takes a further turn one day in the Library of Congress. A former English teacher, she is researching the life of Bathsua Makin, a [real] 17th-century Englishwoman who lived through the eventful times of the Civil War, the Plague, and the Great Fire of London. Makin was a scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and a pioneer of the education of women; for a while, she served as tutor to the King's daughter. Finding a handwritten note from Bathsua tucked into the library copy of her book, Dee replies. And so begins an exchange of letters across the centuries, using a niche in the classics section as a drop box. After a few letters comparing their different eras, written in deliciously contrasting styles, the two women agree to follow the example of Boccaccio's Decameron and exchange longer stories. While reflecting different aspects of their personal lives, these span many genres, including memoir, bedtime tales for children, historical fiction, and even a pastiche of Sophoclean drama.

Dee Young and Bathsua Makin were both extraordinary teachers. So clearly was the author, Rhoda Trooboff. I got this book from one of her former students at the school in Washington where she used to teach. My friend looks back with awe and gratitude at her mentor's example, and I can well see why. She is human, approachable, and caring. As a writer, she has an extraordinary range, but is always lucid and enjoyable. And her knowledge is phenomenal. The quotations that dot the book like raisins in a cake may be in English, Italian, Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, the last two in their original scripts, untransliterated and not always translated. The authors she cites include Homer, Ovid, Cicero, Donne, Dryden, Boswell, Austen, Thoreau, Pound, both Eliot and Elliot, Borges, Marguerite Yourcenar, Margaret Attwood, and dozens more. To read any part of this book is to come into contact with a remarkable mind applying itself to subjects that are personal and very, very real, having to do with marriage, motherhood, illness, grief, and security in an unstable world. It is a book that one might want to keep by one's bedside to dip into at random.

But there's the rub. Dee Young (and Trooboff too, I suspect), is essentially an essayist. This sequence of magical letters does not really read as a two-way correspondence, let alone a novel. There is very little narrative through-line, and the sheer range of the many pieces of writing that it contains detracts from the book's inherent unity.

All the same, Dee Young's year of magical communication succeeds in its endeavor. She shuts down her husband's eMail account. Her correspondence with Bathsua comes to a graceful end. "Dear Self and Reader," she says in her final entry, dated June 23, 2003, "My annus horribilis has become my annus mirabilis." Literature and language have worked their miracle. And so, with a quotation from Chekhov and a poem by May Sarton, she closes, woman and scholar to the end.

Format: Paperback

On June 22, 2002, Dee Young writes an eMail to her husband Dan, the first of a long series of letters and other documents that make up this unusual book. The reader soon ignores the mechanics, and this rhythm of casual communication, short notes dashed off at all hours of the day or night, becomes quite natural, and very much in the moment. In the moment, too, are her references to the outside world -- the legacy of 9/11, the Beltway Sniper, the run-up to war in Iraq -- to anchor the correspondence in reality. Which is necessary, since it soon becomes clear that Dan is dead, and the eMails are Dee's way of conjuring herself through grief.

Dee's magical thinking takes a further turn one day in the Library of Congress. A former English teacher, she is researching the life of Bathsua Makin, a [real] 17th-century Englishwoman who lived through the eventful times of the Civil War, the Plague, and the Great Fire of London. Makin was a scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and a pioneer of the education of women; for a while, she served as tutor to the King's daughter. Finding a handwritten note from Bathsua tucked into the library copy of her book, Dee replies. And so begins an exchange of letters across the centuries, using a niche in the classics section as a drop box. After a few letters comparing their different eras, written in deliciously contrasting styles, the two women agree to follow the example of Boccaccio's Decameron and exchange longer stories. While reflecting different aspects of their personal lives, these span many genres, including memoir, bedtime tales for children, historical fiction, and even a pastiche of Sophoclean drama.

Dee Young and Bathsua Makin were both extraordinary teachers. So clearly was the author, Rhoda Trooboff. I got this book from one of her former students at the school in Washington where she used to teach. My friend looks back with awe and gratitude at her mentor's example, and I can well see why. She is human, approachable, and caring. As a writer, she has an extraordinary range, but is always lucid and enjoyable. And her knowledge is phenomenal. The quotations that dot the book like raisins in a cake may be in English, Italian, Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, the last two in their original scripts, untransliterated and not always translated. The authors she cites include Homer, Ovid, Cicero, Donne, Dryden, Boswell, Austen, Thoreau, Pound, both Eliot and Elliot, Borges, Marguerite Yourcenar, Margaret Attwood, and dozens more. To read any part of this book is to come into contact with a remarkable mind applying itself to subjects that are personal and very, very real, having to do with marriage, motherhood, illness, grief, and security in an unstable world. It is a book that one might want to keep by one's bedside to dip into at random.

But there's the rub. Dee Young (and Trooboff too, I suspect), is essentially an essayist. This sequence of magical letters does not really read as a two-way correspondence, let alone a novel. There is very little narrative through-line, and the sheer range of the many pieces of writing that it contains detracts from the book's inherent unity.

All the same, Dee Young's year of magical communication succeeds in its endeavor. She shuts down her husband's eMail account. Her correspondence with Bathsua comes to a graceful end. "Dear Self and Reader," she says in her final entry, dated June 23, 2003, "My annus horribilis has become my annus mirabilis." Literature and language have worked their miracle. And so, with a quotation from Chekhov and a poem by May Sarton, she closes, woman and scholar to the end.