As an introvert who lives alone, I've often pondered the potential of a novel that took place entirely inside the protagonist's head, with little to no human interaction. This book, about a grieving widow rattling around inside her big old house while dealing with boxes of old family papers (the "hatbox letters" from the title), comes very close to doing just that. I actually enjoyed the interior monologue quality of the novel, but there were two rather large, important aspects that annoyed me: the author's use of detail, and the way the book deals with the grieving process.
The author described everything in tiny, artful, poetic detail. This was a constant distraction, because the structure of the book implied that the narration was entirely from the protagonist's perspective, and in my experience people simply do not notice that level of detail around them. Obviously this does not apply to everyone, because the author clearly noticed it, but it simply rang untrue for me. It was even more distracting during flashbacks to the author's ancestors (who wrote the titular letters). The conceit is that the protagonist is imagining the flashback scenes, but the level of detail is far too much for something being imagined by someone who wasn't even there. It is terribly unfortunate, because I should be admiring the detail as a sign of the author's artistic talents, but I found it very difficult to get past "Oh, come on! Like someone would really notice that!" I think the novel would have been better served if the narration of detail had come from an omniscient third-person narrator.
The general theme of the book is the grieving process. The author is newly widowed, and in reading her ancestor's letters she discovers that her grandfather was originally engaged to her grandmother's sister, but the sister died tragically and her grandfather ended up marrying his deceased fiancée's sister, who eventually became the protagonist's grandmother. The author somehow (and how exactly she does this is unclear to me) uses this information to get over her grief and "move on with her life," as self-help likes to say. But this does not ring true with my own experience of grief. The author was married for decades - close to 30 years, if I remember correctly - and she just sort of "gets over" her grief in only a couple of years by learning that her grandparents were bereaved but eventually got married anyway. This simply does not make sense to me. In my experience, grief does not just go away, and certainly cannot be made to go away by presenting the bereaved with the fact that other people in the past have been bereaved and yet went on and did other things in their life. The fact that life goes on does not negate grief, and it seems absolutely bizarre that they would be presented in such a cause-and-effect manner. I know that society generally considers it commendable for people to "get over it" and "heal" and "move on" (and my theory is that this is considered commendable because it's just easier for other people when the bereaved is no longer acting bereaved), but I simply cannot fathom that a widow of a happy, loving, decades-long marriage would just get over her grief after learning that her grandparents were once bereaved, and then engaging in a few social activities. It seems to very much trivialize the idea of grief, which is an unfortunate sentiment for me to take away from a novel dealing with grief.
I should add that in all of this, there was one tiny detail I absolutely adored: the protagonist was the same size as her husband, and they shared shoes and gardening clothes. Not only do I find the idea of sharing clothes terribly romantic, but it's quite refreshing to see a sympathetic romantic pairing that does not consist of a giant hulk of a man and a dainty petite woman.
Apart from that, I really enjoyed the introspective quality of this novel and I enjoyed watching the flashback plot unfold, but the distracting quality of the level of detail and the ultimately dismissive way in which grief was handled rather ruined the experience for me.
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