The archivist, by Martha Cooley

Matthias is the archivist at an unnamed famous university which holds letters between the poet T. S. Eliot and Emily Hale, who he met as a very young man and continued to write to over many years.  In fact, these letters do exist (at Princeton) and it added a bit to the piquancy of the book, published in 1999, that they are to be unsealed in January 2020 – then we’ll all know what was in them.   Matt, as he is usually called, is a quiet man of settled and regular habits.  However, many years ago, his life was anything but peaceful while he was married to Judith, an intense young woman who becomes fixated on her Jewish background and the ignorance of Americans to the Holocaust as it was unfolding.  Eventually he will have her committed and she dies in the facility years later.  One day, Roberta shows up at the archive demanding to read the sealed letters.  She also has become preoccupied with her Jewish identity having only recently learned that her devout Christian parents were, in fact, converts after escaping the Holocaust.  She is sure that the Eliot-Hale correspondence, written during the years that Eliot was struggling with his own increasingly unhinged wife and his personal religious beliefs, will shed light on conversion.   The novel blends Eliot’s poetry, particularly the Four Quartets, with the ethics of who “owns” personal letters of famous people, and the characters' struggles with long-kept secrets and religious identity.  However, the characters are all somewhat unsympathetic and the final effect of the book is a rather sterile intellectual exercise.  326 pp.