Wrestle, Wrestle

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.”