In Devotions, Lucy Caldwell explores yearning for distant pasts and unknown futures. A young Belfast theatre troupe brings their experimental production of Hamlet to New York. On a night-flight, travelling with a violin older than the United States, a professional musician slips through time. A man who loses all he thought he had, and finds himself haunted by all he never will, comes to a painful new understanding of what it might mean to love.
Lucy Caldwell is less well known here than she should be; it’s time to correct that ... A genuinely ambitious and rewarding collection ... If Caldwell’s short story project were to end with Devotions, circling back to the idea that fate relies on knowing when and how to let go is a tremendously satisfying conclusion.
This varied collection demonstrates Caldwell’s confidence in the flexibility of the short story as a literary form. It builds on the success of her earlier work. Each of her collections works on its own terms, but taken together, they amount to something close to a writer’s autobiography ... Lucy Caldwell’s writing, which was already absorbing and sure-footed, is opening out in new directions.
Caldwell’s collections are some of the most thematically unified that I’ve read, and Devotions is no exception ... Caldwell’s characters who live with fewer regrets are overthinkers—or maybe just artists with a tendency to dwell on the past ... Some of the tension in these stories comes from the characters’ astonishment at the passage of time, at how hard it can be to find order and neatness in one’s own lived narrative ... Caldwell stops her stories short of wresting, and while that might frustrate readers who want to know what happens to her characters, others will find her mix of optimism and melancholy, her acknowledgment that there might not always be a meaning to grasp, reassuring.
