Looking at romance from both sides now
Which Brings Me to You: A Novel in Confessions
By Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 304 pp., $23.95
Dear Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott : OK, so you're calling ``Which Brings Me to You" a novel in confessions, but is it, really? A novel, I mean?
Certainly, it's a novelty: Your characters, John and Jane, meet at a wedding, are soon rolling around in the coat closet, and, instead of consummating their tryst the old -fashioned way, decide to go home and exchange letters, handwritten ones, ink on paper. They will limit their letters to confessions of past relationships and, once they've bared all, only then decide if they'll resume relations.
And so ensue five months of letters between the two of you, or rather, between your characters. The device of having two writers take on separate characters is intriguing, even daring, in an age that celebrates the singular, I -blog-therefore-I-am voice. And if you're going to have a jointly written novel, correspondence is a nice device to divide the labor. Both of you are clever and snappy writers, convincing as love-weary, self-aware 30-somethings in the 21st century. Or, as you call your characters, `` low-grade Romantics. Tough but susceptible. Afflicted by parking lots, empty courtyards, nostalgic pop music."
John has touching moments of vulnerability, but Jane is the more engaging of the pair; her voice narrates the initial meeting, and hers are the moments throughout when it seems a real soul is being bared, instead of just clothes and sexual organs.
(The letters carry no authorial attribution; I'm assuming Baggott, author of ``Girl Talk ," is the voice of Jane, and Almond, author of ``Candyfreak," is the voice of John.)
The big question -- what happens after months of soul-baring when your pair meet again -- provides the narrative tension we need to keep going, although I can't imagine any reader actually believing that all this will lead to nothing. Yet I can't help wondering how much more interesting this story might be if it ultimately did lead to nothing, if, in other words, the letters, in drawing John and Jane closer, finally pushed them apart.
Which brings me to one of the problems I have in their otherwise lively, lusty exchange: Each letter is a fully rendered account of a past relationship ; in this, they strain credulity. The past is being kind if it lets us remember the faces of our old loves, let alone exactly what they said and when.
However, even the most hastily written letters have a certain artifice built in. Isn't that their appeal? They are intimate, revealing, and yet, in the end, never unaware of an audience.
I know a little something about this. In my attic are two boxes of letters . One set is from my best friend. We wrote letters to each other all through our 20s and into our 30s, even when we lived in the same city. The other box is more incendiary; it's filled with letters from a former flame. We wrote to each other for years, a correspondence that was half literary posturing and half seduction, which ended only when we moved in together. (Cautionary note to Jane and John: Our relationship finally imploded, unable to sustain the legacy of all that literary posturing.)
Which brings me to another difficulty of your epistolary device: Jane's and John's chronological narratives of their past relationships are too tidy and ordered. Our personal history of love rarely unrolls itself as a linear narrative that begins with the first and progresses in order; it is, I think, a messier, more mysterious story that keeps getting reordered and rewritten .
Of course, you know this; remember what John wrote? ``There's something fundamentally phony about this arrangement. It plays to our egotism, our need to state the case as we like, avoid the tough questions, boss around our own history. The discourse of love, though, doesn't run on parallel tracks. It collides and makes a big mess."
Still, there is plenty to enjoy here, mostly because of the smartness of the writing and the knowingness of the characters. My hat's off to both of you, for publishing a collaborative work of fiction that throws a modern gloss on the epistolary novel. And thank you for not e-mailing. Or text-messaging. You've reminded us that letters are sometimes our purest form of fiction, since the truth we reveal in them is the result of care and craft.
``Which Brings Me to You" is a good reminder that a letter is to an e-mail as a marriage is to a quick tryst in a coat closet.
Sandra Shea is the author of the novel ``The Realm of Secondhand Souls." 
