The Lost Letters of William Woolf by Helen Cullen

[image error]

My review of Helen Cullen’s debut novel (Michael Joseph) appears in today’s Sunday Business Post Magazine. Here’s a short excerpt:

Back in 1979, John Irving defended Dickens against the charge that his characters were absurdly sentimental by suggesting that, well, real people are absurdly sentimental, too. And Vladimir Nabokov once remarked that “people who denounce the sentimental are generally unaware of what sentiment is.” More recently, academic critics have pointed out that the tag “sentimental” has frequently been used to deny the power and appeal of fiction written by women.

All of which is an elaborate way of saying that your humble reviewer found Helen Cullen’s The Lost Letters of William Woolf a pretty sentimental sort of book, and that it wasn’t entirely to his taste – which isn’t to say that it’s a bad book. It isn’t at all a bad book, in fact: it’s a solidly-crafted piece of commercial fiction with a high-concept hook and some well-realised characters. Its saccharine-ness (saccharinity?) is, as it were, built in: it’s a story about searching for true love; a certain amount of sentimentality is inevitable.