The Headmasters Papers
“The Headmaster’s Papers is an epistolary novel – a form I much admire, chiefly for the difficulty of writing a novel with such a limited structure.
The best writer of fiction in the epistolary form is Alice Munro, and I told Alice once that two things prevented me from trying to write an epistolary novel, which I have long been tempted to do. One is that Alice has already written better in this form than anyone likely will, and two is that Richard A. Hawley wrote The Headmaster’s Papers, an... epistolary novel so heartbreaking that no one is likely to surpass its emotional effect in letter form. I sent a copy of the novel to Alice; she liked it very much. We had a further conversation about epistolary novels, and I told her that I thought Hawley’s novel was so moving that he establishes a virtual rule for future epistolary novels: namely, the last letter in the novel to be a suicide note. Nothing else will do.
The Headmaster’s Papers is entirely composed of one man’s letters – John Greeve’s, the suffering headmaster at an all-boys’ private school.MoreLess
The best writer of fiction in the epistolary form is Alice Munro, and I told Alice once that two things prevented me from trying to write an epistolary novel, which I have long been tempted to do. One is that Alice has already written better in this form than anyone likely will, and two is that Richard A. Hawley wrote The Headmaster’s Papers, an... epistolary novel so heartbreaking that no one is likely to surpass its emotional effect in letter form. I sent a copy of the novel to Alice; she liked it very much. We had a further conversation about epistolary novels, and I told her that I thought Hawley’s novel was so moving that he establishes a virtual rule for future epistolary novels: namely, the last letter in the novel to be a suicide note. Nothing else will do.
The Headmaster’s Papers is entirely composed of one man’s letters – John Greeve’s, the suffering headmaster at an all-boys’ private school.MoreLess
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