Devotion: A Novel, by Madeline Stevens, is certainly a fascinating work, full of tension and strangeness. Stevens is a strong writer, with a wonderful ability to build a sense of menace from all the accumulated details of life, both the banal and extraordinary. She uses language powerfully. Her sentences have punch.
But when I was done, when I pulled back from the novel, I could not resolve broader, almost philosophical issues of the work. It is about gender, power, class, sexuality and sexual power, the private self and the public self – all this is true. But I don't know how they fit together.
As I can't fit the pieces together, I fall back on the narrator as mentally unwell... which seems like a cop out. There is a vexing complexity or confusion at the heart of Devotion.
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