Northern Irish writer Lucy Caldwell's fourth collection of short stories, Devotions, delves into family life, professional pursuits in the arts, and the intricate management of memory. The stories offer a subtle continuity with her earlier works—Multitudes, Intimacies, and Openings—though the connection is organic rather than directly narrative.
Stories of Entrapment and Choice
In All Grown Up, Luke returns to his childhood home and gradually becomes reabsorbed by it. He clears the house to put it on the market, envisioning a future of possibilities. Yet the longer he stays, the less impulse he has to leave, and memories of his life—both past and present—flood back. Luke is a 40-year-old divorcee with a bad back, incipient alcoholism, and a child at boarding school, grappling with divorce, his mother's death, and a sense of entrapment. A one-night stand with his ex-wife's sister offers no solace. The title oscillates between bleak irony and a similarly bleak optimism.
Hamlet, a Love Story
This story is filled with traps. After the run of Choose Your Own Hamlet in a New York dive bar, playwright Sonya ends up with Callum, who isn't her type. She believes she isn't his either. The flaw in her play, where Hamlet loops and replays the original text seeking a way out, is that choose-your-own-ending texts reward action, not choice. "Inaction was punished. Your only hope was to… seize the narrative."
The Lady of the House
This tale reads like a classic ghost story, set in a castle gatehouse with old books and a curse from 1660. Two sisters—one addressed as "you," the other as "Lou"—find common ground when one visits the other's partially renovated heritage home in Scotland. Ghosts of memory rise to match the ghost the unnamed sister encounters on her first night. Lou, exhausted after seven years of IVF, miscarriages, and financial strain, admits that "the most random things have been surfacing lately—things you'd not even call proper memories… just stuff." She's unsure what to do with it, but the reader suspects she will move resolutely forward. The ghost's desires are clearer, carrying both promise and menace.
Quiet Resilience and Duty
Caldwell's characters display a quiet resilience while remaining breakable. She captures them in moments of spiritual and emotional loneliness, supported and defeated by the anxious sense that life is important even when unsolvable. In Little Lands, duty is to one's own future: a shot-by-shot replay of the dance scene in The Sound of Music is paired with the real lives of Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews, who fell in love during filming and regretted not acting on it. In Harmony Hill, a professional violinist traveling alone by air with an instrument "older than the United States of America" feels duty to her talent and teachers—obsession as stewardship. Duty to locality, memory, and origins climaxes in All Grown Up, where Luke realizes that if he doesn't choose his own ending, his future can only be the past.
Transformational Delight and Threat
These stories alternate between transformational delight in life and spirit, and emotional or psychological threat. They are crafted to be savored one at a time, with attention to the author's intention. In A Family Christmas, a harried mother thinks, "We are each of us God, right out on the cutting edge, the universe seeking to know itself. We are an aperture, a point of light, through and by which things can be known." Caldwell speaks here of the devotions of the writer, herself, and these very stories.
Realism and Observation
One of Devotions' most attractive features is its realism, evident in panoramic lists of objects, sharp observation, and captured moments. Caldwell describes sleeping in "the taut stretched acres of an American hotel double, with rolling news on low for company," instantly transporting the reader. Elsewhere, "a few scraps of sky sheared themselves off and fell as snowflakes." Tiny events, places, people, and their relations are utterly observed. The collection is stimulating, frightening, quietly passionate, and comforting. Never overwrought, it offers an oblique yet perfectly human mix—a window to view the world.
