I have very conflicted feelings about “Reservoir 13” by Jon McGregor because I admired so much about its technique and ingenuity, but I often wasn't engaged by the story in that satisfying way I hope a novel will make me feel. The novel centres around 13 year old Rebecca Shaw who goes missing and the effect her disappearance has on the local village. It traces the reverberations of this occurrence for over a decade recording small slices of the villagers' lives and the changing seasons as well as speculation about what happened to Rebecca or “Becky” or “Bex.” In this way, the novel accurately reflects what it's like to be vaguely aware of a missing girl and periodically see references to her in the media over time. It's poignant how a missing child never ages, but remains a peripheral presence in our consciousness while we continue to grow and change. Despite computer generated sketches that speculate how Rebecca might look if she aged, the villagers mentally see the girl preserved in her youthful form and she exists fundamentally as a haunting unanswered question.

McGregor depicts a large cast of characters in a glancing way where we receive intimations about life developments, but never delve into any one character's psyche very deeply. Over a long period of time we see friends make plans for the future, follow different paths in life and reunite for awkward catch-ups. Marriages break up, optimistically come back together and fizzle out again. In this way, the novel gives the most extraordinarily accurate sense of village life where we have a vague awareness of major life changes for a certain group of people, but never truly get to know them. A novel which produces a similar effect (but has a very different style and nature) is Joanna Cannon's “The Trouble with Goats and Sheep” which also concerns a community's reaction to a missing person. It makes a poignant commentary about the natural way we socialize, make assumptions about others and never get the chance to truly engage with them on a meaningful level. It’s also really beautifully written but there are lots of mundane details about the multitude of characters’ lives alongside details that clue you into larger issues those characters are dealing with. Because I didn’t feel like I really knew the characters in depth, I cared about those mundane details even less than I would in a novel where there are a few central characters I got to know really well. If that were the case, I’d be okay with treading water waiting for a more interesting plot development or psychological insight. But, in “Reservoir 13” I felt like I didn't grasp who many of the characters were until page 200 or so – at which time there was so little of their story left in the novel it's like I barely ever knew them at all.

No doubt a rereading would yield a more fruitful understanding of the characters involved. The first time I read Virginia Woolf's “The Waves” I had difficulty distinguishing between the six central characters – partly because the oddball poetic language blurred them into one at first. It's only been through multiple re-readings that each character has crystallised into a distinct individual with many layers of psychological depth. In the long run, that made the novel feel so much more rewarding and also turned it into my absolute favourite novel. The comparison between these novels is apt because McGregor's novel also follows a small group of adolescents' lives as they grow up and in doing so poignantly captures the flow of time and paths in life. Woolf also traces how the sun rises and crosses the sky in her novel while McGregor gives equal weight to changes in nature. Frequently descriptions of characters' lives are interspersed in the same paragraph with an observation about developments in the lives of local animals like birds and foxes. So while we witness characters give birth, change jobs and suffer, we also witness over the years bats who breed, feed and hibernate. This gives an even more fully rounded portrait of what it's like to live in a community.

Each section begins with a new year and a description of fireworks in the village.

Alongside descriptions of specific characters McGregor also refers to the lives of peripheral individuals in a striking way. A man moves to the village and people think of him as “the widower” even though no one knows the specifics of his situation. It turns out that his wife isn't dead at all; they are merely separated. Yet, the community still think of him as a widower and never get to know many more details of his life. The false impression about him has been cemented in the public's consciousness in a way which is both tragic and comic. A similar impression is given of the missing girl's parents who are viewed from a distance in a way that we can see hints of their painful conflict, but don't really fully understand or know them. A different but equally meaningful effect is created when we get a slight understanding of the domestic abuse a mother receives at the hands of her mentally/behaviourally-disabled child or the fear of a woman who escaped a painfully destructive marriage or a man's conflicted feelings about his son's homosexuality. Other characters are hesitant to intrude upon these characters personal lives making the reader feel the excruciating sting of isolation.

All this means that I've been really moved thinking about what Jon McGregor did in the structure and style of this novel. It's a revelatory depiction of what it means to live in a community and society. But, at the same time, when I was actually reading it I found my mind so often drifting to other things and I found it difficult to concentrate on. McGregor's successful stylistic choices effectively convey powerful meaning, but at the expense of a wholly immersive story. So it depends what kind of reading experience you're after. If you want a book you can meditate on and get more out of by reading it a second time around, “Reservoir 13” is a great book. But it's not the kind of novel that pulls you into the text so that you entirely forget that the world exists around you – at least, it didn't do that for me reading it for the first time.

Have you ever had penpals or do you still have penpals? As a teenager I loved writing letters – real physical letters with pen and paper. There used to be a whole culture based around finding other penpals with things called friendship books. You’d add your address and interests to a little booklet with dozens of other names and this would get mailed around by other enthusiastic pen pal folk. It was like a social network site before the internet. In this way I acquired hundreds of penpals from all over the world. It was so exciting learning about other people and cultures far away from my own small town in Maine. But a big part of the thrill was coming home and finding a mail box full of letters addressed to me. It also helped me to know myself better writing about my life to these virtual strangers. There’s a special pleasure in getting a handwritten letter – an art largely lost with the advent of email!

An early correspondence I had with Joyce Carol Oates

The Letters Page recaptures a bit of this magic by producing a literary journal around the form of the written letter and includes extracts, short stories, travelogue and poetry. They’ve just published their first collected volume and it’s a beautiful limited edition boxed set with loose-leaf reproductions of the contributor’s original handwritten letters with illustrations. As editor Jon McGregor discusses in his introduction sending and receiving letters involves lapses of time: the letter you send is sent to the future and the letter you receive is from the past. This completely changes how we read and interpret something as opposed to an email that pops up in an inbox. Also, our handwriting contains our personality and it conveys such a different feeling seeing a person’s scribbles than reading an impersonal type-written form. There can also be things crossed out and doodles in the margins. At the beginning of this volume, George Saunders also discusses how letters aide us in developing “our understanding of our relation to the greater world”. This is definitely something that was important for me writing so many letters as a teenager and discovering the physical world outside of my own little circumscribed existence.

This was one of the last letters my grandmother wrote me. She believed the protein in peanuts was essential for good health. Reading this makes me cry.

The anthology includes writing from some very bright and cutting-edge authors who are able to find a new flair for their subject matter in this concentrated form. I’ve read books by several of these authors recently including Joanna Walsh who writes a funny and touching story about the gradual loss of some special cargo in a journey across Europe, Naomi Alderman who takes a new view on practicing the Jewish faith (or not), Kevin Barry who writes about the spectre of death/communing with other writers in rural Ireland and the hilarious Karen McLeod who writes a chatty letter to Alan Bennett.

There’s also some really diverse and startling writing. Some is more impressionistic like poets cataloguing a travel experience complete with drawings. Then there is writing which is more direct like a heartbreaking letter from Claudia Reed to her father about his struggles in the civil rights movement. Cassie Gonzales letter about representations of race includes a number of strike outs and corrections so the reader gets a sense of the actual thought process learning in some ways more from what’s been crossed out than what’s left in. Each letter says something particular about the experience of letter writing and couldn’t convey what they do in traditional Microsoft Word formatted printed pages. There is a relationship formed in writing and reading letters which is so intimate like peering into someone else’s window. As someone who used to love exchanging letters so much, it’s thrilling to see this form being kept alive in such a creative format as The Letters Page. Find out more about this special anthology here and the publisher Book Ex Machina's ordering page here.