Review by Kevin Brown
Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood’s latest novel, takes the form a of diary — or a devotional, perhaps, as it does reveal a type of devotion — of an unnamed narrator who withdraws from the world. The narrator first comes to the convent as a way to escape the world, which has begun to seem overwhelming to her. Her husband has moved to take a new job, and the narrator thinks it’s obvious that the relationship is over. However, the main motivator seems to be her feeling that she can’t do any good in the world, which had been her career and focus.
She ran the Threatened Species Rescue Center, but she now feels she has done as much harm as she had good. Thus, she visits the convent to take some time to reboot. In the second section of the novel, however, she has become a participant in the community, though not quite on the path to become a nun. In fact, she doesn’t really have any faith in God, though she likes the idea of attention as a type of devotion. She left rather abruptly, as she references people from her previous life who feel betrayed by her quick departure, especially given that she didn’t notify them.
The convent is also near where the narrator grew up, and she seems to be mourning the relatively recent death of her mother — who had died before her first visit to the convent — who did good in the community in a quiet manner, unlike the narrator’s work. She interacts with a schoolmate from her childhood, Helen Parry, an activist nun who has come to the convent during the pandemic to deliver the bones of a nun who worked with her, but who began her time at this convent. The narrator admits that she and others bullied Helen when she was in school, though Helen doesn’t seem to concern herself with that part of her childhood, as she had a mother who struggled with mental illness and was abusive.
This novel is pared down to the essentials, much like the landscape that surrounds the convent, focusing on the narrator’s reflections on what it means to live a good life, mainly through the contrast between an ascetic life as a nun and that of a highly visible activist. Neither the narrator nor Wood attempt to provide an answer to that question, as they want readers to answer it for themselves.
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. Riverhead Books, February 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
