If the mail holds any surprises for novelist Cathleen Schine, it is likely to come as a fan letter or a nice bit of news from a friend. After all, discerning readers open her comic novels with the same happy anticipation that greets a box of Belgian chocolates or a gift wrapped in pretty paper.
So imagine her reaction to an odd, crumpled letter she found in a big pile of mail that arrived one summer day.
“It was a letter to someone else. It said, `Dear Goat,’ and it was signed, `As ever, Ram,’ ” Schine says, recalling that the contents pointed to a bitter breakup of an illicit love affair.
“The initial effect is that it really upset me, and I really felt like a voyeur. I felt very guilty and sort of titillated by it. I tore it into shreds, I threw it away. As soon as I’d done that, I thought, `Wait a minute, this is my novel.’ “
The novel, her fourth, is “The Love Letter” (Houghton Mifflin), a literary romance for which critics have fallen hard: Entertainment Weekly gave it an A, and Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, concludes, “This book enchants and seduces.”
Its heroine is Helen MacFarquhar, 42, the owner of a bookstore in picturesque Pequot, a college town on the Atlantic Coast. The single mother of a young daughter away at summer camp, Helen is self-supporting, smart and flirtatious. She’s also a bit smug.
Then, one morning, she receives a strange love letter that piques her curiosity and passion. It has the same effect on Johnny, a handsome college student who works in her store and happens to read the letter, and the two embark on an affair.
The novel is something of a departure for Schine, 42, wife of New York magazine film critic David Denby and mother of two young boys. Her previous novels are “Alice in Bed” (1983), about a “teenager in a hospital who has all these horrible experiences but remains the same self-centered, spoiled teenager”; its sequel, “To the Birdhouse” (1990); and perhaps her best-known work, “Rameau’s Niece” (1993), a comedy of manners about a 28-year-old scholar whose biography of an 18th Century woman becomes a surprise best seller.
“I really wanted to write a romance,” she says of “The Love Letter.” “I think that love and passion and sex are very, very comical. They have their absurd side, which is what I have always written about.
“But as anyone who has ever experienced love or passion or desire or sex knows, it’s all very serious and painful, too. Even as you say to yourself, `This is ridiculous,’ you feel it with all of its intense power and earnestness. That, I felt, would be very challenging to write about.”
Despite knowing a lot about books, the author knew next to nothing about the business of running a bookstore before sitting down to write “The Love Letter.”
“Once I got Helen into the bookstore, I had no idea what she would do, absolutely no idea what one did in a bookstore,” she says.
With the help of a friend, she arranged an apprenticeship at Three Lives bookstore in Manhattan.
“At first when I went there, I thought I was going to work and I was in a terrible sweat. It was tremendously physical; there was an awful lot of bending down and toting. And then a customer would ask about a book that I had never heard of. I was hopeless.
“So finally they allowed me to fold up the boxes and to check books against the list when they came in. Mostly I just watched.”
The bookstore in the novel is Horatio Street Books, a small pink cottage on Main Street next to an espresso bar. Its four rooms are stocked with poetry, fiction, general non-fiction and military history, a particular boon to business.
Schine writes: “And military history sold–the Civil War and George Custer leading the ranks. It sold daily, to the same customers. They were voracious, insatiable, like mystery readers, only male. Helen had put the mystery shelves quite close to the military history shelves, hoping the two would somehow cross-pollinate, their fruit a new hybrid customer. . . . But the seed never took, and Helen soon gave up. Each readership stuck to its own, inbred as Hapsburgs, as hillbillies.”
But a strong attraction develops between the bookseller, Helen, and young Johnny, despite the age difference.
“A couple of reviewers have said, `Oh, it’s such an odd coupling.’ They can’t believe that a 20-year-old would be interested in a woman 20 years older.” she says.
“It seemed to me that this is something that could happen that would shock both parties, which is what I wanted. She’s shocked that she would be interested in this kid who has a pimple, and he’s shocked that he could be interested in this middle-aged woman who looks like a middle-aged woman. Even though she’s very beautiful, she still looks grown up, acts grown up, treats him like a kid, and yet something happens between them.
“The very fact that it doesn’t make any sense shows me how powerful it is, and that’s what I wanted to write about.”
And what of the crumpled “Dear Goat” letter that showed up that day in the mail?
“I still don’t know who it was from,” she says. “I’ve never been able to figure it out. Someone who reads this book will know who wrote it, and someone else will know. Only two people will know.”
