Book Report: The Devoted

37. Blair Hurley, The Devoted (2018) (1/4/19)

This book is about a spiritual journey—sort of—and it's a coming-of-age story—also sort of, since the protagonist, Nicole, is thirtysomething when we meet her. She may not be young, but she's certainly confused enough.

The narrative begins in the present, as Bostonian Nicole seeks to escape her Zen "master," who remains nameless—and who for years has mixed sex in his private chambers and psychological domination in with his spiritual teachings. Nicole's brother has found Nicole an apartment in New York, and she's considering a change. On Christmas Eve, while mulling things over at a church service, she meets a recent divorcé, Sean. They grow close, but she decides to move to New York anyway. There, very quickly, she is contacted by a young woman, Jocelyn, who exhorts her to tell her story. Which she does, though she's never told anyone all of it before. She also dabbles in teaching Zen on her own, to a gaggle of variously motivated women seeking solace—until the Master reappears and begins exerting control over her again from afar.

The story Nicole tells Jocelyn goes back to her youth in Boston, where she was raised Catholic by a kind father and a depressive mother who finds extreme comfort in the Church. This takes place just as the sex abuse scandals are hitting and churches are closing. Nicole finds herself not just drifting, but sailing full-speed away from Catholicism and from her mother. She begins flirting with Buddhism while still in high school, then hits the road with two boys on a quest to join a monastery in Colorado. They drift; they grift; eventually, just as they are about to reach their goal, there's a blizzardy accident and one of the boys dies. She is brought home. Her father becomes ill and dies. She finds the Peaceful Healing Zen Center and spends ten years there, becoming the Master's "favorite student."

This is a first novel, and it felt like one: a little ragged, a little uneven—despite the glowing accolades by such luminaries as Joyce Carol Oates and Chang-Rae Lee (both call it "beautifully written") and Anita Shreve ("Hurley is a gorgeous writer"). There were lovely passages to be sure, but the whole package made me wonder if she had an editor. (She did, a "deeply insightful" one whom she credits in the acknowledgments.) There were some hefty metaphors, such as a never-ending soap-caked glob of hair that she pulls from her shower drain, which represents the past ten years, going back to when she was twenty-two, full of desire to be "the Master's for this life and all the next lives." Or bonsai trees cultivated by the Master, discovered by Nicole's brother: "He could appreciate the aesthetic pleasure of these delicate things. Beside them was spread an array of tools—wire cutters, snub-nosed pliers. And now he could see the technique behind the artistry: black wires spiraled tightly about the slender fingerling trunks, embracing them cruelly." Bonsai trees as Zen students. Or vice versa. There are multiple, detailed descriptions of the many (many) odds-and-ends—knickknacks, antiques, pieces of furniture—that Sean, a bit of a lost soul, collects. And there are occasional small but jarring inconsistencies (in one paragraph, Sean tells Nicole, "My wife . . . was so eager to get to California that she . . . left me all the furniture"; then two paragraphs down he says, "My wife took a lot of furniture." What? Which was it?) Characterizations were often uneven, motivations incomplete, certain actions unlikely.

All that said, Nicole's clumsy questing for some sort of spiritual foundation and meaning—well, it was fine. I guess I believe that she found her own path in the end, or at least was on the way there. The most satisfying passages did evoke the beauty of practice and devotion. "Sometimes meditation was like following a bouncing ball down a flight of stairs. . . . It floated her down levels of thought, leading her toward something silent and immovable at the core of her." When she attends an Easter service to appease her unforgiving mother, "She could see a mosaic of human faces, all of them familiar in their still poses. Of course they wanted the same things she did . . . the promise that sadness was not the inherent state of their lives, that the axle of the world turned on secret wells of joy."

I especially enjoyed a section where Nicole explains her personal experience of the Noble Eightfold Path (right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right effort, right livelihood, right mindfulness, right concentration) over a certain summer and fall, all narrated in the second person. Under Right Speech she avers, "We must learn how to love so that the beloved feels free." Perhaps, then, the journey of this book is Nicole's finding of both real love and freedom.

I'd give the book three stars on GoodReads because of its unevenness. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to most of my friends. But I'm not entirely sorry I took the time to read it, either.