This
novel hinges on the brand new internet, set in 1999. Our heroes work at a
newspaper but their hours rarely overlap. Lincoln reads email flagged for
violating the paper’s draconian forbidden word list. Beth, the movie reviewer,
emails back and forth with her friend Jennifer all day long, completely
ignoring the word list. Lincoln falls in love with Beth from reading her email,
while Beth falls in love with Lincoln from how he behaves during a few sightings
where they don’t even interact.
The
turning point of the novel happens when Lincoln has an unmistakable
conversation with Doris, the vending machine lady, about the cremated remains
of her bassett hound, and then reads an email where Beth reports the
conversation to Jennifer. Lincoln realizes that he himself is “my cute guy”
that he’s been jealous of in Beth’s emails for half the book.
As
readers, of course, we have known all along. We’re privy to both Lincoln’s
reading of the epistolary conversations between Beth and Jennifer, and the
third person omniscient narration of Lincoln’s life, as they alternate, so we
know perfectly well they’re falling in love with each other. But Lincoln finds
out first that Beth is in love with him, and he’s fallen in love with Beth
without ever having seen her. Doesn’t this sound like the 90s? Like Tom Hanks
and Meg Ryan should be starring in the movie adaptation and everything would be
in unbearably quaint and chunky fonts.
The tricky part of this romance is
that it’s very creepy to read someone’s email, especially if they’ve been
writing about having a major crush on you. Even though it was his job to read
the email, Lincoln could not imagine a way for Beth not to find that amazingly,
offputtingly creepy. He knew far too much about her life, her boyfriend, her
breakup, her family, her history, and her personality from his official
eavesdropping. And he went to Beth’s boyfriend’s band’s shows all the time, at
first hoping to run into her there in a natural kind of way, but then realized
it made him seem even more of a stalker.
It
does feel quite creepy for us as readers to know that Beth is the only one in
the dark. I might almost want this to be rewritten to be the other way around,
with the female computer tech reading the male writer’s emails. But the added
creep factor the way it is now helps build a tremendous barrier between our two
characters, so that’s appropriate for dramatic reasons. And Lincoln is
desperately aware of how awful he’s being, even though he has never seen Beth,
to his knowledge, which somehow makes it better. And Beth has been stalking him
as well, even standing behind him in a line for popcorn at the movies, but too
nervous or awkward about her own stalking to make contact.
We’re
put in the same uncomfortable position as they are, in fact, which is pretty
nice. It also highlights how readers interact with book characters to begin
with, knowing way too much about them, having incredible insight into their
lives, without the characters being aware of it at all. I do love the
metafictional aspect of this. Two people who work for the same newspaper orbit
around each other at an unbridgeable distance.
The
big breakdown happens, of course, on New Year’s Eve of 1999, when Lincoln is
working in IT in case of Y2K disasters, and Beth is in the office because all
the writers and editors are there in case the world ends. Beth writes something
to Jennifer about Lincoln and he sees it, then gets up his nerve and runs
upstairs to meet her at last, but can’t overcome his reluctance to tell her the
utterly awkward and cringeworthy fact that he’s been reading all of her private
conversations with her best friend. Lincoln runs out instead of meeting her and
gets completely drunk with his friends in despair.
Worse,
Beth and Jennifer stop emailing for weeks and months, just quick notes to say
hi. It’s clear they’re still friends, but nothing is the way it was, and
neither we nor Lincoln know why. Finally they both come out with their painful
stories, over email, of course. Beth already knew Jennifer had had a
miscarriage, and was carefully avoiding the topic, but Jennifer did not know
that Beth had broken up with her long term boyfriend at a wedding. When Lincoln
reads this and realizes he has way too much insider knowledge and power in
their non-relationship, he quits his job. His last act at work is to write a
letter to Beth, telling her he was reading her email, and apologizing, He tapes
it to her computer monitor late at night and walks out.
We know,
given the situation, that they will have to overcome
this added obstacle to find each other. But it looks pretty hopeless. Lincoln
gets a new job, loses track of Beth entirely because he no longer has access to
her email, and even goes on a hopelessly awful date. Then, in perfect romantic
comedy vein, they meet by accident at a movie. Lincoln tries to hide, planning
to escape when the theater goes dark for the movie, dying of embarrassment, but
Beth sits down next to him. This is finally the moment when everyone knows
everything equally. It’s excruciating but such a relief. They only exchange a
few words (most of Lincoln’s are “I’m sorry,”) and then the movie starts, and
all the tension goes into kissing in the darkness.
It’s
a wonderful way to resolve this situation because in the darkness of a movie
theater, with someone else’s story playing out, when they can’t talk at all,
they’re able to disappear and find each other. It’s like being on the internet,
but in person. At the end of the movie, of course, they have to emerge into the
light and have an actual conversation about what happened, that written
apology, and their inexcusable stalking of each other. For Beth, the crucial
shift in her acceptance of their relationship comes when she finds out he fell
in love with her without ever seeing her, without even knowing what she looked
like. Once she gets that, they’re home free.
I
adore an epistolary novel. I love that we tell our version of the truth and not
what’s actually rock solid true. It’s like the Facebook effect, filtering out
all the ugliness and unpleasantness and keeping the good stuff and the
palatable outrage. But emailing with a best friend, that’s real truth, not the
usual Facebooking that happens in most letters. How often do we trust our
absolute truth to interpersonal communication anymore? Which is more true, our
polite, sanitized Facebook versions of ourselves, or that deeper level that
doesn’t get spoken? There’s an unstated level at which this entire book is
about the feeling that if people really knew our real selves, they wouldn’t be
able to love us, and then finding out that they do know, and they love us after
all.
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