The minute I read a review of Charlotte Wood’s new novel, Stone Yard Devotional, I knew I had to buy it. I picked it up the second I got it home and haven’t put it down yet.
I’m only halfway through, but I can’t remember being so touched or absorbed by a novel as by this Booker Prize Finalist (2024). It is the most relevant book I’ve read about our world and our searches for a place in it.
Not since Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s great work One Hundred Years of Solitude was I so taken with so imaginative and wrenching a story.
The narrator’s story is ours and my story in so many ways. Is our world overwhelming us? Are we failing it? When I decided to leave my life after decades in a suburb of New Jersey with my wife and daughter, I wondered how to do some good and find love and happiness.
At age 68, after 35 years of marriage, I ran away from home, my wife and daughter, and my life and fled to a cabin on the top of a big hill in upstate New York with all of Thomas Merton’s books and diaries to read. I read every one of those books on that mountain for a year.
I didn’t run to a monstery but turned my cabin into one as best as possible. I also ran to a place I had never been.
I have never been happier than now, but I accept that I will never truly forgive myself and that the people I love will never truly forgive me for leaving.
The nameless beginning subject of this magical and profoundly thought-provoking book is the narrator’s realization that she is burned out, a failure in her work, and in the process of ending her long marriage.
While her husband is moving on to his new life in London, she will visit a remote corner of Australia. The book opens with the narrator leaving Sydney to return to a place near where she grew up—the stark plains of rural Australia, where she grew up deep and forgotten. They never say goodbye. She has no idea where she is going or where she will land.
She doesn’t believe in God, doesn’t know what a prayer is, and is as surprised as her friends to find herself in this alien, reclusive Catholic convent in the middle of nowhere almost entirely by accident. She is offered her room, moves into a guest house, and only sees the nuns when they come out to pray. She has no sure idea what she is doing there.
She has no desire to find God or be a nun. She is lost and alone, a hero journey if ever there was one. Her close friend accuses her of running away. She won’t deny it.
The woman, an animal species conservationist, has given up on making animals or people in our world better. Global extinction? Human indifference and greed? Power is moving almost entirely to billionaires and shameless demagogues. Is there a point in trying? Was she not helpless in the face of so many entrenched obstacles? Wasn’t she a failure?
Don’t so many of us ask these questions today with beating hearts and sometimes wish we could run away to someplace peaceful and safe? Like I wanted to do.
These are the reasons she’s given up on her life and fled to the struggling convent to live.
Surprisingly, she ended up at a nun’s retreat and was as good as her words. She stayed, at least for a while. Here, she felt alone and safe. I know the feeling. As I did, she learned there can be peace, but there is no such thing as a perfect life.
For weeks, she lies and sleeps on the floor; without prayer or conversion, she joins in the convent’s strange life, showing for most, helping to cook. There is no moment of revelation, epiphany, or sense of redemptions. She absorbed her own life into the strange place where she found herself.
And I haven’t even mentioned the mice. The drama at the convent comes from outside through three arrivals. The first came from the mortal remains of Sister Jenny, a member of the order who was murdered in Thailand years before after a flood revealed her bones in a storm.
The bones are accompanied by their most famous sister, an activist called Helen Parry, whose presence pulls the noise and trouble of the world inside their retreat. The mice – a fantastic non-fiction climate disaster – come to them in a plague as horrifying numbers flee a drought in the north and invade every inch of the continent, a shocking and scary (and mesmerizing) part of the book. In a sense, a horror story.
I won’t go further with the story than this for obvious reasons.
It was eerie, surprising, and thought-provoking so many times and for many reasons. She asked the same questions I asked myself when I tore myself away from my life and onto the Hero Journey to an unknown world.
As happy as I am, I will always wonder if this was a moral thing to do and if I will ever have answers. And I will never get over it.
I’ve learned that you can never run away from your life, but you can make it better.
It was my life’s best and worst experience, and I am eager to know if she found some answers. I will finish the book by tomorrow.
Last night, I read more than 120 pages and am about to pick it up again—less than 200 to go. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a novel that has gotten me thinking as eagerly as this one.
I learned so much on this journey. The answer was never in the mirror; it was always inside me. The problem was no matter where I moved or ran, I came along.
That is where I had to go find out who I was. I don’t know yet what the narrator has decided.
Like me, the narrator left her everyday life to search for her place in the world and do no harm. I am eager to see what happens next. Years and years later, I’m just now finding my place and accepting it.
Decisions like this are not easy or very clear. I came looking for the same things, entering the world of the refugee forever, uprooted from the life I was closest to and all that I knew, and am still searching for the truth. I broke faith with people I cared about. I will never get over it. Was it a good and moral decision? Am I doing any good?
Does it all seem overwhelming?
Sometimes, yes, I think so, but I’m not the one who can say. I will never stop looking. Like the narrator, you are never “one of us” again when you go on this search and go away. I belong to the person I love and my own open heart.
When you leave home, you never find another one and never want to return.
In this search, we can only look for the right thing and pray that we have found it.
The New York Times ended Wood’s book review in this way and had me running for the bookstore:
“Activism, abdication, atonement, grace: In this novel, one of these paths is holier than the other; Wood is more invested in noticing the human pursuit of holiness itself. “Not denounced, not forgiven,” the narrator and her sins swing in the uncomfortable uncertainty of the living. Nothing can exempt a person from this moral stain, from mortality – not even being a nun on the edge of the earth.”
Or a writer on a mountain.
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As is evident, I couldn’t recommend this book more if you ever want to know who you are.
