Volume 42, Number 16 · October 19, 1995
Heartburn
By Claire Messud
The Love Letter
by Cathleen Schine
Houghton Mifflin, 257 pp., $19.95
Where would love be without the love letter? The messenger, the vessel of love, it is also, in Cathleen Schine's charming fourth novel, its conjurer. It works its magic upon Helen MacFarquhar, a divorced mother of one in her early forties, who runs a bookstore in a well-heeled seaside town in Connecticut called Pequot. Bathed in history, Pequot is a place of quaint shops and sprawling old houses, in which Helen's pink-fronted bookstore strikes the perfect note of cultivation and slight nonconformity. Perfect notes are Helen's forte: her life is thoroughly ordered and agreeable, not by chance but by the force of will: 'Those things Helen could control...she did control. What she could not control, she regarded as insubstantial or as inevitable. Most of her feelings she deemed insubstantial and she sent them packing with barely a nod of recognition.'
Review, 1211 words
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