Correspondence: A Novel - Softcover

Sue Thomas is Senior Policy Researcher at Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. She has previously served as Director of Women's Studies at Georgetown University and is the author of How Women Legislate (OUP, 1994).
Clyde Wilcox is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. His most recent books include the Financiers of Congressional Elections: Investors, Ideologues, and Intimates, and Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective: The One, the Few, and the Many.

Unobtrusively British what-is-real, who-is-who, computer- reality puzzler whose narrator, despondent at the deaths of her husband and children in an accident, becomes a ``compositor''--one who uses computers to compile virtual-reality fantasies. In this particular creation, the narrator appears as Shirley, a lonely woman with a liking for quiet woodlands and empty beaches. As the narrator, almost constantly plugged into computer hardware, grows ever more withdrawn, she gradually transforms herself with surgery and grafts into a machinelike cyborg. Her last emotional act is to create Rosa--a contented, eccentric earth-mother who lives in a ramshackle old cottage in the woods. Shirley and Rosa become friends and, ultimately, lovers. At last, just as the narrator loses all memory of the past by achieving full cyborg status, Shirley accidentally drowns in the sea; but a virus that has appeared in the cyborg's programming turns out to be none other than Rosa, so there's survival and redemption after all. Meanwhile, in the weakest plot element, readers are represented as voyeurs who occasionally meddle in the development of the fantasy. Minor but often affecting, the inexorable metaphors notwithstanding, while the computer complications manage to be both rather trite and too clever by half. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.