Charlotte Wood’s ‘Stone Yard Devotional’
What are we to do with ourselves, in this broken world? This question flits through Stone Yard Devotional, the latest novel from Australian writer Charlotte Wood. At the novel’s start, an unnamed narrator has gone to spend a few days at an abbey in New South Wales. The abbey is near her hometown, which she hasn’t visited in decades. She is there to take a break: from her job in environmental activism, her failing marriage, and the noise of the city. But from the start, the nuns seem to be doing everything wrong. They blow leaves, sell gaudy homemade candles, eat processed food poured out of plastic single-serving wrappers. “Even here,” she gripes, there is “the inescapable imperative to generate garbage.”
Australian author Charlotte Wood. Image: Carly Earl/Supplied
Yet strangest of all is how often the nuns stop what they are doing to meet at the little stone chapel to pray. “[H]ow do they get anything done?” the narrator wonders incredulously. Wood’s narrator was raised Catholic and educated in a local Catholic school, but she has fallen away for so long that she can describe herself as an atheist. Yet she finds herself turning up, again and again, to sit in the back corner of the chapel while they pray. And as she sits there, she has a realization: “It’s not an interruption to the work; it is the work. This is the doing.” She leaves abruptly on the morning of the fifth day, and her last thoughts are of sushi.
And then…she returns. She eventually moves in with the nuns, and her “they” turns into a “we.” The why of this—why the abbey, why the nuns, why the sudden jarring decision to uproot and transplant her life—remains a mystery for her, or at least a question she has long stopped attempting to answer. This is not a conversion narrative—not a story of one worldview overthrown by another. The narrator does not pray, she does not return to the Church, and she does not take any vows. The complicity of Catholic nuns in the mistreatment of unwed mothers and the attempted cultural annihilation of Aboriginal Australians remain wounds. “Yet here I am,” she reflects. “Wrestle, wrestle.” Stone Yard Devotional lives in the space between those two words. By separating themselves from the world, the sisters have created their own little world, and without material support from the Church, they must work to maintain it. They keep chickens, till garden beds, shovel compost, make gaudy gift-shop candles, blow leaves. They scold one another, get into snits, hold grudges, regret. This is the ordinary work of daily life, made more visible somehow by its apparent distance from ordinary life. And it is deeply spiritual. As one sister reprimands the narrator, prayer is “not chitchat; it’s hard labour.” They must do it in order to live.
Across these days, Wood’s narrator reflects on the other people in her life who did “hard labour”: teachers, friends, and especially her mother—a florist and churchgoer whose small provincial life was devoted to serving her family, infirm local women, and relocated Vietnamese refugees. The narrator returns frequently to memories of this broad-minded woman, whose cutting-edge opinions often embarrassed the narrator as a girl, but clearly formed her. From her mother’s plastic countertop bins of food scraps, an environmentalist was born. A diffident churchgoer paved the way for an ambivalent searcher.
Wood narrates all this in a deceptively even style. During her first trip to the abbey, the narrator gives each day its own chapter and makes note of everything, as if keeping a journal. Yet after her return to the abbey, the sentences become shorter and place equal emphasis on action, experience, and memory. The only difference between the words about her life in the abbey and the words describing her teenage memories is one of verb tense: present and past, respectively. Wood’s equilibrium reflects the mental life of her narrator, who still struggles with all the petty, impolite instincts of her pre-Abbey life, yet is trying, often successfully, to live with them and to reckon with how they shaped the course of her life. This searching provides a verbal continuity between seemingly distant things, connecting the narrator’s life now with all her experiences then, without the need to force any Proustian revelations. Wood is too wise and sure-footed for that. In her great confidence, she has built a novel that is flush with the world. Nothing sticks out.
Despite their apparent separation, the sisters do live in our world, and are subject to its perils. They begin to find mice sneaking around the buildings, tiny intruders who quickly make a mess of things, eating the sisters’ vegetables, killing chicks, burrowing into the walls and making their nests in the car. The nuns catch and kill so many that a mass grave must be dug to keep from poisoning the local birds. Yet this plague is entirely natural: the mice are sweeping all across the surrounding countryside during this early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic.
And then there are the bones. Decades before, a woman named Sr. Jenny had taken her vows at the abbey and then left to open a shelter for abused women in Bangkok. In 1998, she was kidnapped by an American Catholic priest, and her body was never found. But now, in 2020, her bones have turned up, and the sisters would like to bury her at the abbey.
Jenny’s remains are chaperoned from Thailand by Helen Parry, a celebrity nun, a woman of action and a radical environmentalist. Wood’s narrator knew Parry in her childhood. Back then, Parry was a derelict girl beaten by her unwell mother, abandoned by her teachers, and persecuted by her classmates—shameful acts that the narrator deeply regrets. Yet Parry seems not to remember the narrator, or simply does not care. There is too much to do out there in the world. Parry is always busy organizing or protesting something; she takes video-conferencing calls out in the abbey’s far paddocks. The nuns of the abbey think she’s self-important.
But Wood is not interested in simple juxtapositions. The sisters have their life, Parry hers, and they are joined together by their shared commitment to life as something we must do, not merely let happen. In its deep commitment to mundane profundity, Stone Yard Devotional reminds me of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone. There, an older man is made to confront the futility of hiding the part his life plays in the turmoil of world events. Here, the world rests easily across the landscape, embodied in every life. Yet both books wed the vastness of the world to the necessary intimacy of experience. By moving to the abbey, Wood’s narrator has seemingly rejected the big commitments she once made to fight for the future. Yet by living in community with her sisters, she commits to doing just a bit less harm, still touched by the ravages of the world but not yielding to them.
Perhaps this is why she returns so often to memories of her mother, the gardener. Her mother was no earth-mover, no hero. She could not remake the world, as her daughter later tried to do. Yet she spent her days tilling, feeding, and enriching her plot. Her inability to repair the world at large did not distract or discourage her from tending to the one right around her. “My mother said that anything that had once been alive should go back into the soil,” the narrator recalls. “Anything that lived could make itself useful, become nourishment in death.” This is the novel’s necessarily incomplete solution to its narrator’s despair: to be holy is to keep working, to live, to disappoint, to go on. Wrestle, wrestle.
Stone Yard Devotional
A Novel
Charlotte Wood
Riverhead Books
$28 | 304 pp.
Robert Rubsam is a contributing writer to Commonweal. His work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Baffler, and the Nation, among other places.
Reproduced with permission from Commonweal.
