Dani Shapiro's memoir "Devotion" is a 42-year-old woman's spiritual exploration of her relationship to God, religion and faith. Using an a la carte approach (including yoga, Buddhism, Judaism, kabbalah, ayurvedic philosophy, Thomas Merton and Virginia Woolf), Shapiro examines the rituals and mores of various belief systems as though she were pinching each with tweezers. She holds them up to her inquisitive eye, not unlike the way she inspects her mother's Pucci outfits while cleaning out her closet after she dies. With both (the clothes and the rituals), Shapiro tries them on for size, eventually discarding them in search of a better fit: "Keep, store, toss."
Shapiro chronicles her crises: a strained relationship with her mother, her father's death, concerns about midlife pregnancy and her parents' car accident - yet many events seem extracurricular and the people minor characters in a largely internal dialogue. "The outside world was a blur. Where was I? I had no idea. Instead, I was lost in some story - usually a story that hadn't even happened."
That's not to say that "Devotion" is indulgent. On the contrary, Shapiro demonstrates great restraint in not writing a confessional memoir. But often her point of view is abstruse or overly cautious, and she holds the nerve of the narrative at arm's length. What's missing is Shapiro's willingness to let the reader into her everyday life, and thus there is little context for her despair. Much of Shapiro's interface with the outside world occurs in monologues, thwarting her journey.
"When I am in the middle of yoga practice - if I allow it to happen - my jaw will begin to shake violently. My teeth will chatter. My throat will open up, becoming almost hollow, as if a scream is trying to escape. In the midst of my peaceful, contented life, a wave crashes over me. ... It's hard, scary, completely out-of-control." She is having an existential crisis, yet there is no clear reason why.
A memoir, by definition, is self-aggrandizing, but the lone voice of Shapiro, supplemented by the platitudes of sages, yogis, teachers and literary figures, makes the story line feel hemmed in. Subsequently, "Devotion" is oddly internal without being intimate. Calamities such as breast surgery and AA meetings are marginalized. That's not to suggest that "Devotion" should be filled with the mundane or the lurid, but reticent intimacy doesn't lend itself to a soul-searching tale.
What's successful in "Devotion" is Shapiro's method of stringing together disparate moments, lapsed memories and present-day realities, demonstrating that spiritual journeys are not linear. There are moments of wit and wonderful wordplay, and I never doubted Shapiro's integrity, as a writer or as someone struggling with faith. But in the end, the movement is lateral. She is a travel writer unwilling to travel.
Kerri Arsenault of Oakland is content supervisor for Narrative magazine. E-mail her at books@sfchronicle.com.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/28/RVE21C1S06.DTL#ixzz0h57jet8e
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