Like an update to Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, Blair Hurley's first novel, The Devoted, tells of a young woman's struggle to reconcile a strict Boston Catholic upbringing with a decade of Buddhist training. Confused and searching, Nicole Hennessey trades in aspirations of Catholic sisterhood and an adulation of her parish priest for obedience and sexual submission to her zen master. After an ill-fated yearlong run from home at 17 ("smelling of weed, wary as a cat, creeping out of her house"), she makes her way to the Peaceful Healing Zen Center ("a glass storefront, wedged in between a hardware store and a Mexican restaurant") where she gradually falls under the spell of the zendo's master. Suspicious of Nicole's obsession, her concerned older brother lures her to Brooklyn in hopes that a new place will break her pattern of spiritual dependence.
A Pushcart Prize-winner and native of Boston, Hurley captures the heart of the Hub, including its provincial and reticent citizens "with every face hidden behind a baseball cap or a coat collar... so buttoned up, so tribal." It is the vulnerable yet determined Nicole, however, who puts the zest into The Devoted. Whether probing the hoarding fetish of a sensitive guy she picks up in a Boston bar or becoming an informal roshi herself to a women she meets in an Upper East Side zendo, she is a sincere, if flawed, seeker of personal fulfillment and independence. Hurley's abundant talent convincingly illustrates that dharma don't come easy. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.