An epistle is a letter sent to a person or group of people that is generally elegant,  formal and didactic in nature. This is the form of Luanne Rice and Joseph Monninger’s collaborative novel, The Letters.

Sam and Hadley West have lost their only child, Paul, in a plane crash in Alaska, where he had gone to teach. The loss of their son throws their marriage into turmoil and they are now on opposite sides of the continent waiting for their divorce to become final. Hadley, an artist, is holed up in a little cottage on an island off the coast of Maine. Sam, a sports journalist, has gone to Alaska in an effort to recreate Paul’s last days and see the site of the plane crash. The Letters (no surpise here) is the shared correspondence between the two as they work through their individual grief and slowly make their way back to each other.

In theory, this sort of novel is fraught with problems from the get-go. First of all, it’s all tell. Dear Hadley, today I did this. Dear Sam, today I thought this. I mean, people don’t write this sort of letter anymore, do they? Geesh, I don’t think people write letters at all anymore and I say this as a life-long letter writer who might write a half dozen letters a year now– most of them scribbled notes. So, as a reader, if you can get past the conceit, you then have to decide whether the novel has the emotional resonance the topic deserves.

I liked The Letters. Hadley and Sam were two people faced with an unbearable tragedy. Their letters allow them to work through their grief, unload some of their anxiety and face up to past mistakes. It also allows them the opportunity (and the reader, too) to trace the trajectory of their lives – from the moment they met to this place they now find themselves…where they need each other more than anything and yet make the very human mistake of pushing each other away.

In less competent hands, The Letters might have been a hot mess, but Rice and Monninger do an admirable job of making Sam and Hadley  people with real flaws and their story should be relatable to anyone who has ever lost  a child or almost walked away from the very person they need most.

Jane Green (author of books like The Beach House and Promises to Keep) says Sarah Duncan’s novel Adultery for Beginners is “completely engrossing. Like having an affair with (thankfully) none of the guilt.” I find that endorsement sort of strange, really. Like  we all dream about having affairs or something. Is there something titillating about them?

Duncan’s novel tells the story of  Isabel and Neil. They’ve been married for a while, living the ex-pat life because of Neil’s job as an engineer and have only recently returned home to England with their children, Katie and Michael. Isabel has been a devoted wife and mother, but now that she’s back in England and her children are a little older, she’s decided that she wants to work, perhaps in an office, filing.

“Darling, it’s easy to see it’s years since you’ve been in an office. No one does filing anymore; it’s all on computer,” is her husband’s useful response to that notion.

But Isabel does get a break, through a casual conversation with another mother, and soon she finds herself working for Patrick, a gorgeous egomaniac who somehow manages to find Isabel devastatingly attractive even though Isabel herself feels rather frumpy.

The lesson here: all affairs end badly. Yes, in the beginning, it’s all exciting and sexy but Isabel is not unattached. She has responsibilities which soon get short shrift as she spends her afternoons having wild sex with Patrick.  It doesn’t take Isabel very long to figure out that in order to have what she thinks she wants, she’s going to have to give up everything she already has. It’s certainly not a new dilemma, but Duncan does a good job of making Isabel sympathetic, especially to readers of a certain age.

And Neil, as it turns out, is not the man scorned and that opens up a whole other set of problems. If I have one niggle about the book it’s that the suffering and recriminations – when  it comes – isn’t really realistic. And Isabel, for all her hard-won freedom as she works out her issues and takes the steps necessary to find the woman she left behind in order to be a wife and mother, falls rather too quickly, if not exactly into the arms of another man, into a man-like safety net. That said, Adultery for Beginners is entertaining and well-written.