The early stages of a manuscript are a time of malleable muse, when an author’s extracurricular reading—if there is such a thing—takes on additional weight. With this in mind, Australian author Charlotte Wood trawled through William Butler Yeats as she began writing her Booker-shortlisted Stone Yard Devotional. So powerful was the touchstone she found there, she can still recite it from memory.
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“Only that which does not teach,” says Wood via Zoom, “which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.”
Wood continues, “There’s a lot of teaching and admonishing and explaining that goes on in contemporary fiction. And I was sick of it. I wanted to write a book that had as little explanation as I could get away with.” Thus did she begin to pen her seventh novel shortly before the pandemic. The book featured a nameless first-person narrator who moves from Sydney, Wood’s current home, to a religious convent on an arid rural plain, “almost as bare as bedrock.” The latter approximated Wood’s childhood on the Monaro, a lunarlike plateau some hundred miles south of Australia’s capital in Canberra. “The stripped back voice mirrors the landscape,” says Wood. It also aligns with Yeats’s directive.
Prioritizing asceticism in multiple senses of the word, Wood strove to leave her tale ambivalent to the point of mystery. The novel’s areligious narrator didn’t know what she wanted from the convent and couldn’t comprehend the nuns’ colorless routines. Wood, an atheist by virtue of her Catholic upbringing—“when I was younger,” she tells me, “I felt that all nuns and priests were idiots”—didn’t know either. But she found ample inspiration in the world around her.
Australia’s “Black Summer” wildfires had just ripped across the country. The pandemic arrived fresh on its heels. There were other oddities, too. Floods followed the blazes’ initial scouring, and a mouse plague sprouted up in New South Wales in 2021. As if humanity rolled a one on the ol’ d-20.
Wood channeled this bleakness into her prose, both directly—there’s a mouse plague in the book—and indirectly, as when a woman is remembered, in an aside, to have strolled off the edge of South Australia’s Nullarbor Plain in the middle of the night. But the worst was yet to come. Wood had just completed the novel’s first draft when misfortune struck in a more personal manner.
“I had the final scenes,” she says, “like, thank God, I’ve got a book. I stepped away from the keyboard with that feeling of exhaustion and relief. Then I went grocery shopping. And while I was there, I got a phone call from the mammogram people: ‘you need to come back.’”
Wood received a breast cancer diagnosis during her follow-up. Her older sister had just suffered the same pronouncement. Not one week later, their younger sister got her own. “It was a very deep, existential experience,” Wood says of that time. “My concentration just vanished. I put [the book] away for at least six months.”
Wood and her siblings overcame their respective diagnoses and are now in good health. But Wood returned to the novel with a changed perspective—how could she not? “I doubled down on this desire not to teach, not to explain,” she says, “because of the understanding of my own mortality. I was already writing stuff about grief, which is very, very autobiographical. I thought I understood life is short. But this was like, holy shit.”
Luckily the Stone Yard Devotion manuscript, even in completed draft, was fantastically pliable. After a linear series of diary entries describes the narrator’s early days at the convent, the story’s temporal bounds give way to shuffled vignettes and distant memories, even journalistic non sequiturs. Asked if she drew from Renata Adler or Patricia Lockwood, Wood counters: Elizabeth Strout and Sigrid Nunez. But then she cites, rather more interestingly, fine art.
“I realized early on that I have this place of silence and stasis,” says Wood of her setting, “which is not good for a novel. I thought, I’m kind of writing a still life painting.”
Following this intuition, Wood sought advice from Australian painter Jude Rae, whose still life oil work has, per Wood, “an appealing movement, like shimmering in the paint.” How did Rae produce such kineticism? She told Wood, “The first thing I do is break up the surface of the picture.”
Wood thought vignettes could perform a similar trick, keeping readers guessing even while the narrator remains stationary. A hazy Catholic school memory might proceed a bulk mouse trap purchase, followed by an Elie Wiesel quote and a rough transcription of a dream. (“Last night: a family of kangaroos, haunch-deep in a quietly lapping tropical ocean, nuzzling at the edges of large floating piles of garbage, eating.”) Wood adhered to Yeats more than ever during edits, winnowing the stark manuscript into yet harsher form. She drew renewed attention to the weather (taking a turn) and the bones of a dead sister (still spooky). As for the rodents: “Yesterday I heard a shriek from Carmel in the kitchen. From its pitch, I knew it had to do with mice. There is something terrible in a quiet place about the sound of a woman’s screams. It is worse than the sound itself; it gathers force, becomes an omen or a reminder of something horrible from the past.”
“I realized early on that I have this place of silence and stasis,” says Wood of her setting, “which is not good for a novel. I thought, I’m kind of writing a still life painting.”
The novel’s motifs were congealing into a slow lament, commandeered by Wood’s brush with mortality. Although her Stone Yard narrator never actually dons the habit, she does the same essential work as the sisters, considering the pillars of faith—sin, forgiveness, death—through a lens of quiet inaction. “Do you have to believe in God to join a religious order?” the narrator considers. “Nobody has ever asked me, specifically, about belief. And, anyway, I haven’t ever joined. Not really.”
Wood herself remains an atheist, but as the novel indicates, she’s transcended her “priests as idiots” phase. “There’s a lot of fundamentalist atheism out there that I find really off putting,” she says. “There are contradictions in being alive that we have to accept. For me, some of those contradictions have to do with religion. There’s so much that’s destructive about religion, and yet, a lot of the most humane work being done for people who are suffering is by religious people.”
Stone Yard Devotional began as an investigation into why contemporary women would join a religious community in the first place. There were no easy answers to the question. As Wood’s study deepened, she saw that answerless questions form their own kind of sympathy, as when her narrator makes a quip about a sister’s beliefs and realizes, “I had traduced something she found beautiful and profound, and I know what that feels like, to have something you cherish ridiculed. It’s a horrible reduction in your sense of yourself. It makes you feel stupid and ashamed, and I was sorry to have done that to Josephine.”
These pinpoint philosophical breakthroughs, key to the novel’s denouement, weren’t part of Wood’s initial goal for the book. This makes them all the more brilliant when they arrive. Unfurling at a pace commensurate with the narrator’s ruminative, page-by-page evolution, the “meaning” of this sneaky-profound novel packs a punch. The tastemakers thought so, too. Last September, it was announced that Wood would be the first Australian author shortlisted for the Booker in 10 years, since Richard Flanagan won the 2014 award. It was just about the last thing Wood expected. “Being an Australian writer, you often feel very, very far away from the big literary world.” In the moment of her recognition, “I privately thought, oh Jesus, you have made a big mistake.”
Her publisher had called to preempt the news—for both the shortlist and the long—prompting what Wood calls “a strange couple of weeks” as she digested her star turn in private. “I had no idea how enormous the Booker Prize machine is,” she says. “I think for artists, it’s kind of important not to think about prizes, to just do their work and not look too hard at who’s winning what.”
As if living by example, Wood makes a renewed rush to humble herself, chalking the nomination up to luck, to timing, to the specific makeup of this year’s panel. In one sense, sure, literary taste is nearly as insoluble as the questions in Stone Yard Devotional. But let’s be real. When the book finally drops in the US this week, American audiences will get a lesson in deserved acclaim.
