Cathleen Schine's "The Love Letter"

In Cathleen Schine's new novel The Love Letter, the reader is peace fully cradled in the idyllic New England town of Pequot. Upper middle class and quasi-intellectual, Pequot's soil bears wild raspberries, black-eyed susans, and Helen MacFarquhar, the independent, self absorbed proprietress of Horatio Street Books. In the pink bungalow that houses her bookstore, Helen wields the power, woos the town, and is abruptly thrown off-kilter, one "tangled morning" in June, by the arrival of a mysterious love letter. In the oft-repeated lines of the love letter, this romantic comedy posits questions about the mechanics of falling in love, and the nature of the letter as genre, as revelation, and as an instrument of power. Pequot is not the kind of town in which one would expect to find a pink bookstore. "An artists' colony without the artists .. .An upper middle class backwater" Helen's mother says of Pequot, when a newly divorced Helen returns to her hometown with her daughter Emily. "The upper middle class reads books," Helen astutely observes. Moreover,'"It buys the books it reads,"' especially under Helen's influ ence. At forty-two, Helen is a consummate flirt; she seduces the entire town with her "private public kisses" (light pecks of greeting or thanks—on the lips) and her knack for suggesting just the right volume of poetry. Thus when the love letter, addressed "Dear Goat" and signed "As ever, Ram," arrives in her mail, she is both baffled and disturbed. She's not certain that it's meant for her, but nonetheless speculates endlessly as to whom "Ram" may be. If indeed it is meant for her, she objects to the boldness of it: "I am the maestro, the pup peteer, the dominatrix of suggestion and half-acknowledged desire," she insists.