‘Stone Yard Devotional’ is as extraordinary as you’ve heard
Given the monastic pacing of Charlotte Wood’s “Stone Yard Devotional,” I suppose it’s appropriate that we’ve had to wait patiently for it. Wood’s fellow Australians have been praising this story about a small abbey of nuns since the novel was published in 2023. Last year, it was a finalist for Britain’s Booker Prize. And now, as though publishing were operating by steam ship, “Stone Yard Devotional” has finally arrived in the United States.
It’s just as extraordinary as the whispers from abroad suggested. But don’t recommend it to your book club because if some of your members don’t like it – and some certainly won’t – you may not have the stamina to tolerate them any longer.
The unnamed narrator of “Stone Yard Devotional” is a woman of a certain age who’s joined a remote Catholic order – or, if not joined, at least moved in. With a caustic sense of wit and an unrelenting critical eye, she’s hardly the typical postulant. She’s troubled by “the savagery of the Catholic Church.” Shoveling compost is the closest she ever gets to prayer. She’s nauseated by sisters prattling on about how they “fell in love with Jesus.” Nobody asks, but she confesses that she’s an atheist.
And yet, for all the narrator’s self-conscious rejections of religion, “Stone Yard Devotional” is a deeply spiritual novel. Marilynne Robinson’s Calvinist heart might protest, but this tale of sojourn among the nuns is founded on the same rock of introspection that anchors the “Gilead” series. It’s a yearslong night wrestling with an angel capable of dislocating a thigh or a life. Wood’s narrator pursues fundamentally spiritual concerns: What is our purpose? Can we be forgiven for acts of callousness and neglect? Why are we here?
Why the narrator is here in this abbey is a source of persistent mystery at the center of “Stone Yard Devotional.” On her first visit, she says, “The place has the feel of a 1970s health resort or eco-commune, but is not welcoming.” Fewer than 10 nuns keep the facility running. They clean and they sing – “a chiming, medieval sort of sound” – but their real work is prayer and reading from the Scriptures, what the narrator regards as “biblical mumbo jumbo.” She’s skeptical, even dismissive. “I struggle to see the relevance of any of it to these women and their lives,” she says. “What is the meaning of this ancient Hebrew bombast about enemies and borders and persecution? What’s the point of their singing about it day after day after day?”
And yet, in the novel’s second section we find that she’s settled in permanently – a decision that still surprises her – and everyone who once knew her. “You do not announce on Facebook that you, an atheist, are leaving your job and your home and your husband to join a cloistered religious community,” she writes. “I mean you could, and it might be a better way than I chose, which was not to announce anything to anyone.” The details are sketchy. After all, she’s not really narrating a story to us, so much as allowing us to listen in on her darting thoughts. But we do learn that she was once an environmentalist who lost faith in everything, including her efforts to save the world. “There may be a word in another language for what brought me to this place,” she says, “to describe my particular kind of despair at that time.”
So now she cleans, gardens and sings with the abbey’s few remaining women. There are petty disagreements but no real conflicts, no scandals, no affairs. And yet the quiet, intensely private voice of “Stone Yard Devotional” feels more intimate than a library of confessional novels.
This is a spiritual journey narrated by a woman who would scoff at such a phrase. With its emphasis on the labor of monastic life, the whole thing could easily be unbearably precious – one of those glittery “simple abundance” books about the authentic joys of drinking sun tea and scrubbing the toilet bowl. But Wood couldn’t be further from that simpering treacle. Her narrator isn’t pursuing mindfulness, she’s hounded by it. Instances of thoughtlessness and meanness stick to her from decades ago. Shouldn’t she have been kinder? Couldn’t she have behaved with greater courage? She responds to these memories of moral cowardice – going all the way back to her teenage years – with searing clarity.
The fact that “Stone Yard Devotional” not only stays aloft but soars would seem to deny the laws of literary physics. The novel progresses like a diary of clipped, undated entries – some a few pages long, some only a few lines long – a mix of observations and reflections, pedestrian and cosmic, created with the apparent spontaneity and artlessness that only the most skillful writers can attain. Wood has developed a style that relies on dislocation, juxtaposition and elision to suggest the currents of spiritual turmoil and resolution. A lesser artist would push too hard for tenderness, for meaning, for what Hemingway called “fake” mysticism.
The progression of anything resembling a plot seems hardly noticeable or, eventually, even desirable. For instance, a description of collecting eggs in the chicken coup leads – without any transition – to a memory of her parents helping to resettle refugees who had fled the Vietnam War. A three-page story about a hated guest at a friend’s wedding decades ago feels simultaneously irrelevant and flawlessly crafted. These disparate anecdotes and memories move with apparent randomness until suddenly you see that – checkmate – Wood has quietly trapped you in some shattering realization.
Like others who’ve sought to abandon the world, the narrator discovers that it follows her even here. A terrible drought exacerbated by climate change produces a mouse plague of biblical proportions. The creatures are everywhere, in everything – so many that the sisters can hear them climbing the walls, scurrying under their beds. The narrator, who once worked to save the natural world, finds much of her day taken up with emptying buckets of dead rodents and trying to devise more effective ways to bury their carcasses.
It’s a repellent but visceral metaphor for the way death haunts this fallen world – and this novel. But another, more complicated ghost arrives at the abbey, too. The nuns get word that the body of one of their former sisters will be returned to them for burial. And her remains will be accompanied by Sister Helen Parry, a nun whose bold activism has made her famous.
For all the sisters in the abbey, the arrival of a celebrity like Helen Parry is an anxiety-inducing event, but for the narrator, it’s a crisis. Not only is Helen still bravely doing the work that she abandoned, but the narrator knew Helen in high school and treated her cruelly. What sort of apologies can she offer Helen now, she wonders, and what kind of forgiveness, if any, is she due?
There is, finally, an arc to “Stone Yard Devotional,” though it’s closer to the movements of Philip Glass than Beethoven. Ultimately, a strange sense of engagement with these pages gives way to sheer gratitude for the chance to be in the presence of such restraint and wisdom.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for the Washington Post. He is the book critic for “CBS Sunday Morning.”