The Archivist by Martha Cooley

The Archivist has been around for a good ten years. Every now and then I see it pop up on a shelf at some over crowded book store, hidden among thousands of other books. The summary intrigues, the blurbs confirm its place in history, this book is a gem.  The writing is eloquent, the plot, well it constantly thickens, the story grabs and then pulls you in and leaves you wondering "seriously, this is her first novel?"  I only wish I had read Cooley sooner.

Matt, is an aging archivist at a well recognized, yet unnamed, east-coast school. He has in his charge of, among other items, a sealed vault of letters T.S. Eliot wrote to his would-be mistress, Emily Hale. (If you don't know the story here, it can all be summed up with a single picture, of which I have yet to find, but will do my best. Eliot meets Hale, Eliot marries Vivienne, Vivienne goes crazy and is institutionalized, all the while Eliot maintains a relationship with Hale, one which he can never fully confirm or dismiss.) To make things a bit more intriguing, Matt once had a wife who was unable to keep the lines of reality and fiction from blurring together...sound familiar, wait there's more. Then Matt meets a young woman Roberta (read here Emily Hale) and she is both the key to his unleashing of the past and his pursuit of the future.  Okay, so you are thinking this sounds obvious and too easy. Now add in an absurd understanding, on Cooley's part, of Eliot's work. Plus questions of love, religion, faith, insanity, books, solitude and so much more. There is so much in this novel. And the real kicker is, Cooley makes it look like a walk in the park. It feels so simple yet you finish it and there are so many questions. It penetrates the souls of its characters and a bit of the reader as well. I don't even know how to fit it all in.  So I end with this blurb, which I think sums it up well:

"Remarkable...Though Cooley has twinned the tales of poets and madness, Christians and Jews, caretakers and gatekeepers and betrayers, the stories never appear contrived, only very, very human." -Martha Baker, St. Louis Post-Dispatch