Review by New York Times Review
IF your kitsch meter starts clicking when you learn that a novel features a flock of swans - oh no, here comes a trumpeting parade of clichés about fidelity-don't worry. Howard Norman is too good a writer to use this image to such banal effect. As it happens, the swans in "Devotion" belong to an estate in Nova Scotia that takes in wounded birds, and none of them have a mate. Rather than romanticize them, Norman notes their "awkward, comical swagger" and the painful way, when their keeper tries to feed them, "their bills jabbed the palm of his hand." These are real-world creatures in a story not just about fidelity but about betrayal and atonement. Norman begins with the matter-of-fact recounting of a misdeed: "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 cafe 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." Norman employed this technique in his best-known novel, "The Bird Artist," which begins with its narrator confessing to a murder. We are set immediately to wondering not what happened, but why and how. At the time of the accident, we soon learn, David had just returned from his honeymoon with William's daughter, Maggie. While she flew back home to Halifax, he remained in London, where his father-in-law found him in a hotel room with an ex-girlfriend. William spends the next year recovering from his injuries while David, estranged from his new wife, broods over how they came to such a pass - which turns out to be rather more complicated (and less compromising) than it initially appeared. Determined to stay close to Maggie, David takes over William's job at the estate in rural Nova Scotia, looking after its resident swans. Norman's depiction of Maggie and David's romance is blurry at the edges, as perhaps befits two characters who decide to marry before they really know each other. ("To David, the simple fact was love at first sight. The moment provided the definition.") Richer and more interesting, though, is Norman's account of David's slow reconciliation with his wonderfully complex father-in-law. William is, quite naturally, infuriated by David's presumed infidelity. The moment he's sufficiently recovered, he decks his errant son-in-law, breaking his jaw. Yet the very next morning, William is at the hospital to visit David, registering himself as "family" and taking care to be "somewhat formally dressed" "herringbone sports jacket, corduroy trousers, dark shirt and tie, clothes far too heavy for summer." He can be a man of few words, but when he does speak at length he betrays more heart than one might have imagined. "The thing is, young couples, when they're courting, they have to feel like they're inventing happiness," he tells David, trying to sort out his reactions to the impulsive marriage of his only child. "I knew Margaret was head over heels. And how that boosted my spirits on her behalf." Yet for all the novel's fine points, it can seem carelessly constructed. The chronology doesn't add up: we learn that William met and married his wife at the age of 33 and that he's currently 61, yet his daughter with that now dead wife is not in her late 20s but somehow 30. When Maggie asks David about his unusual last name, he responds that it's "Czech. My grandfather was from Czechoslovakia. On my mother's side." (Which doesn't answer her question, if patrilineal naming is assumed to apply.) At their first breakfast together, Maggie orders a muffin, but we see her eating only toast. Did she get the toast with the muffin or by mistake or from David's plate? One moment of clarity could free the reader to focus on more salient issues. Such details may be niggling, but they yank Norman's readers out of the story. Coupled with the occasional unbelievable description, this can make "Devotion" hard going. Sitting with David in the hospital, paging through a family album, William talks of a photograph of young Maggie sitting on the front steps of the house, supposedly caught not in an instant but in an emotional, hours-long conversation with the owners of the estate, whom she learns are Holocaust survivors. Would even an adoring father photograph such an emotional colloquy? These lapses of authorial attention stick out, in part, because Norman's prose can be so vivid. "The car seemed almost to materialize out of the crepuscular light," he writes of a night-time entry into the grounds of the estate, "crunching gravel under its hubcapped tires, headlights sweeping the main house." When David wades into the swans' pond, he feels "the slickness and slope of the hard-packed clay bottom. Up to his chest in water, he stretched out, performed a quick breaststroke, reversed direction, sidestroked back to where he stood again. And that was all, really, he wanted. To gain footing. To hold still. It was a peaceful moment. The slight beaded chill on his skin. The ineluctable strangeness of swimming with swans." Such plain but evocative writing deserves to be in a novel that takes more care - one like "The Bird Artist," which I reread after finishing "Devotion." A dozen years after I first encountered it, that book still seems as luminous, precise and strange as a painted miniature. I still like it enormously. Emily Barton's second novel, "Brookland," has just been released in paperback.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
This novel combines themes of Norman's award-winning fiction--birds, photography, literature, and his beloved Nova Scotia--but lacks the melodrama of his Canadian trilogy ( The Bird Artist, 1994; The Museum Guard, 1998; and The Haunting of L. , 2002). Opening with a confrontation between newly married David Kozol and his father-in-law, William Field, that ends with Field being hit by a car, this works backward to show its cause. When Kozol, an amateur photographer who becomes an expert on Czech master Josef Sudek, spots Maggie Field in London, it's love at first sight, and within a few months they're married. But the honeymoon is followed immediately by estrangement, during which Kozol cares both for his recovering father-in-law and for the mute swans on the Nova Scotia estate for which Field is caretaker. This is a beautifully written story of love gone awry, with a wonderfully drawn cast; but one is left thinking that any of the main characters could easily have lessened the travails of all. A rather slight entry from such an accomplished novelist. --Michele Leber Copyright 2006 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 dtente 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 a teasing 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). Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
