Devotion: A Novel

by Howard Norman

Overview

A “striking, beautifully rendered” novel of love gone wrong, by the author of National Book Award finalist The Bird Artist (The Washington Post Book World).

Devotion is an unconventional love story that begins with the recounting of an unlikely crime.
 
Shortly after his marriage to Maggie Field, David Kozol and his father-in-law, William, came to blows on a London sidewalk. William stumbled backward into the path of a taxi, and eleven months later he is still convalescing—and begrudgingly accepting David’s assistance.
 
Estranged from Maggie and desperate to get her back, David has taken over William’s job as caretaker of a large rural estate on the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. There, he tends to the main house, his father-in-law, and the resident flock of cranky, impertinent swans. The love between him and Maggie had been instantaneous and intense, and her absence is a constant reminder of how real and enduring it is. But sometimes small things lead to big damages, and strenuous effort is required for even the chance of recovery.
 
“Rarely has such a short novel touched on so many important truths or probed such operatic depths.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
 
“Any novel by Howard Norman is cause for celebration. . . . He demonstrates with marveling deliberation that devotion is its own romantic adventure.” —Lorrie Moore
 
“Perhaps his best novel yet.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547561745
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	11/01/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	795 KB

About the Author

Howard Norman is a three-time winner of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a winner of the Lannan Literary Award for fiction. His novels The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist were both nominated for National Book Awards. Norman is also author of the novels The Museum Guard, The Haunting of L., What Is Left the Daughter, and Next Life Might Be Kinder. He divides his time between East Calais, Vermont, and Washington, DC.
HOWARD NORMAN is a three-time winner of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a winner of the Lannan Award for fiction. His novels The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist were both nominated for National Book Awards. He is also author of the novels The Museum Guard, The Haunting of L, What Is Left the Daughter,Next Life Might Be Kinder, and My Darling Detective. He divides his time between East Calais, Vermont, and Washington, D.C.

Read an Excerpt

The Accident

Here is what happened. In London on the morning of August 19, 1985, David Kozol and his father- in-law, William Field, had a violent quarrel on George Street. In a café they came to blows. Two waitresses threw them out. On the sidewalk they started up again. William stumbled backward from the curb and was struck by a taxi. The London police record called it “assault by mutual affray.” This took place eleven months ago. In the intervening time David replaced William as caretaker of the Tecosky estate, near Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, on the north shore of the Bay of Fundy. William had been recovering in the main house.
Now it is near dusk on July 13, 1986. David, dressed in khaki shorts and a black T-shirt, barefoot, followed a line of nineteen swans with clipped wings up from the spring-fed pond. He wondered if there was such a word as “swanherd.” He enjoyed watching each swan’s awkward, comical swagger. The summer had been one relentless heat wave. David said out loud, “A swan walked right up and bit me in a park when I was eleven, in Vancouver. Maybe one of your distant cousins. Who knows?” Once David got the swans inside their pen and double-latched the gate, he walked across the lawn, wet from a fleeting late-afternoon cloudburst, the first rain in a month. Leaving footprints on the kitchen’s checkerboard linoleum floor, he walked to the counter and reheated coffee. He sat at the kitchen table and continued reading The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard by Anatole France, the book William’s daughter, Maggie, was reading when David had seen her for the first time.
Before he met Maggie, David had fallen off reading novels. Yet he purchased nine novels by Anatole France, each a small leather-bound copy, on a single visit to the Antiquarian Muse, a used-book shop in Truro, a forty- five-minute drive east from the estate on Route 2. In June he read The Queen Pedauque and Penguin Island, often staying up through the night. Actually, he did not have the concentration or critical wherewithal to measure his level of engagement with a given novel; he only knew they kept him connected to Maggie, who, asWilliam said, “is still your wife on paper.” His reading tastes generally did not run to such philosophically leavened plots, or such noble sentiments as “the forces of my soul in revolt.” Yet he had written those very words out on a piece of paper, admitting they corresponded to how he felt since the accident.
The guesthouse consisted of a kitchen, a small sitting room, a bedroom, and a utility room. It had a sloped roof with black shingles. On the fireplace mantel in the sitting room was a 1950s Grundig-Majestic turntable. David stacked records on the floor. He had come to rely on Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello, performed by the Hungarian Janos Starker. This was a utilitarian choice. David knew he was in a bad state, that every day he had to consciously work himself up to melancholy. Somehow the Bach compositions assisted in this. They allowed, as Anatole France had written of an acquaintance, “splendid companionship: my self-inflicted torment, his stark spirit.” David drank too much coffee while reading. Worked his heartbeat to Morse code. What might the message be, besides not to drink so much coffee? He could not read it, an illiterate at reading his own heart.
He set down The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard in order to write in his notebook. It was 3 a.m. He had come to think of it as an “if only” notebook. If only Maggie and I had flown back together from our honeymoon to Halifax; if only, when I saw Katrine Novak in front of Durrants Hotel in London, I had ordered my taxi to continue on past; if only I hadn’t allowed Katrine Novak up to my hotel room, William would not have found me out; if only I hadn’t chased William down George Street, he would not have been almost killed by a taxi . . .
The strange thing about this notebook was that David believed everything he wrote at the moment he wrote it. Later the truth always sank in. Although he was mollified for half an hour or more by filling pages with these solipsistic equations of remorse, he finally knew that no ordering or reordering of events could save him from the effects of his own folly. Small things led to big damages — or something like that. He had badly screwed up; the steep price exacted was the ceaseless reminder of Maggie’s absence. It flummoxed and pained him that his wife was not locatable, a situation he had, of course, brought on himself. He literally did not know, day to day, month to month, where she was in the world. Most likely Halifax, where she kept an apartment, but possibly somewhere in Europe, where her work occasionally took her. She was publicity director oof the Dalhousie Ensemble, a faculty-student classical-music group consisting of twelve players, from Dalhousie University. His father-----in-law William always knew Maggie’s whereabouts, but was not telling.
He marked his place in the novels with a leather bookmark borrowed from the library in the main house. He kept The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard on the kitchen table. The others were in a pile on the counter next to the bread boards. My Friend’s Book, The Red Lily, A Mummer’s Tale, The Gods Are Athirst, Manuscript of a Village Doctor, Patroologica. He was grateful that Anatole France had written so many. He read by a floor lamp set next to the table. On the most sweltering of nights, if he managed to sleep at all, he did so in a chaise longue on the screen porch off the sitting room. He set up electric table fans for a cross-breeze. Often there was a mist so dense he could not see his own feet or hands when, guided by the swans’ muttering, he walked to the pen and fed them dry kernels of corn. Their bills jabbed the palm of his hand, but they only meant to take what was unexpectedly offered, a kind of midnight snack.
Copyright © 2007 by Howard Norman. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Editorial Reviews

Norman's intriguing, if at times baffling, sixth novel opens with a fight between Canadians David Kozol and his father-in-law, William Field, outside a hotel in London "on the morning of August 19, 1985." That date is important-it's just days after Kozol's marriage to William's daughter, Maggie-and an ensuing accident seriously injures William, the caretaker of a Nova Scotia estate on the north shore of the Bay of Fundy. The result is a particularly strange domestic situation: Kozol assumes William's duties on the estate; Maggie refuses to see her husband; William vows revenge on his son-in-law. Uncovering why the men were fighting and what separates the young couple drives the plot. Norman (The Bird Artist) uses the avian world as a counterpoint to the human one. William is devoted to the swans on the estate; Maggie wants in her own life the kind of devotion the swans embody. This quirky story deals with a powerful theme: how love endures despite our best efforts to sabotage it. Author tour. (Feb.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

If one accepts the idea that love is generally a very messy sort of thing, then one might also be willing to accept the unusual ways in which people structure that messiness to make it fit into their otherwise orderly lives. Veteran author Norman (The Museum Guard) offers a brief novel that follows two people who fall in love too quickly, their impulsiveness giving way to long-term consequences and the setting of some unusual rules for love as they see it. Set primarily in Nova Scotia, the story involves Maggie and David, Maggie's rules, David's character flaws, Maggie's father, and a bevy of swans. Both the swans and the people require highly specialized caretaking. As for Maggie and David, once their damaged love has been organized in a certain way, it is nearly impossible to change things; they hold on to their wounded psyches for dear life. The story is filled with ambivalence: How does one reconcile one's completely idealized devotion when faced with the inevitable human frailties of the other? Just as often happens in real life, the ambivalence in this story doesn't get resolved. Norman explores a treacherous yet familiar emotional landscape with consequences that may appeal to readers who enjoy the interior fiction of Alice Munro or Annie Proulx. Purchase as interest warrants. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/06.]-Susanne Wells, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A fledgling artist's attempts to give design and coherence to his personal life are the subject of this appealing if odd sixth novel from the free-range Vermont author. What we first learn of protagonist David Kozol is that he had, during his London honeymoon, been found-by his new father-in-law William Field-in a hotel room with another woman. This resulted in a scuffle during which William was struck by a taxi and severely injured. The novel then shifts forward and backward, depicting David's developing fascination with disturbingly unconventional Czech photographer Josef Sudek, his soaringly romantic chance meeting with Maggie Field (publicist for a traveling chamber orchestra) and the impulsive marriage that brought David (a Vancouver native) to Nova Scotia and the rural estate of its absentee owners (Holocaust survivors) Isador and Stefania Tecosky, where William caretakes and acts as guardian to a flock of (rather intemperate) swans. Following William's "accident," David becomes the caretaker for both the estate and William, maintaining a wary detente with the aggrieved older man-who eventually makes good on his repeated promise, "I'll knock your lights out." David is an appealing, credible, flawed young man (William thinks he's a "man who doesn't have the slightest notion of how to handle life"). The novel is also flawed, however, by overabundant exposition and occasionally awkward shifts from present- to past-tense narration. But it's filled with engaging characters (the voluble charmer Maggie, sharp-witted local veterinarian Naomi Bloor, inept burglar Tobias Knox) and oddball details and incidents (e.g., a house-trashing perpetrated by "pissed-off swans"). And the swans are ateasing complex image-of beauty, fidelity, mystery, the souls we like to think we possess and the kind of fragility that invites violation. Vintage Norman, though not as good as The Bird Artist (1994) or The Museum Guard (1998). Agent: Melanie Jackson/Melanie Jackson Agency

Kirkus Reviews