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The Maytrees: A Novelby Annie Dillard |
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Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. Hands-off, he hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems.
In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the Maytrees' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. When their son Petie appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. But years later it is Deary who causes the town to talk.
In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. She presents nature's vastness and nearness. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Dillard's original body of work.
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A disappointment after Pilgrim at Tinker Creek -  |
The Maytrees: A Novel Review |
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I loved Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and was excited when I saw the audio-version of The Maytrees at my library. I didn't enjoy the book. I am very surprised to see so many good reviews. I can't imagine we are talking about the same book!
Dillard's use of language in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek had me reading and rereading with joy. The rereading (relistening) I did with The Maytrees was because I couldn't recall the story. I just couldn't connect or care about the characters. It has been said that Dillard cut this book from an original 500 pages; I think the connection was edited out. There are moments of beautiful text, but they don't last or are lost among the flat story. The story is hard to sum up without revealing too much. It is about the relationship of a man and woman over four decades. It covers life, love, and forgiveness. I really wanted to like this book. I will pick up another Dillard book, but regret having spent my time on this one. |
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flowery to the point of suffocation -  |
The Maytrees: A Novel Review |
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This was a "share" book, given to me by someone who loved it. That was all right because an earlier share book was "Eat,Pray, Love," which turned out to be very compelling. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about "The Maytrees." I found it irritating from the start, with a reliance on poetic language that was so self-conscious I was embarrassed for the author. The characters seem to be drawn out of the mists (perhaps that is appropriate to the landscape of Cape Cod), and as a result "there is no there there." I would not call this a novel, but an extended selection of poetic moments. Anyway, authors should always go back and check Dickens' before sending in their latest works for publication. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Grab your reader from Line One. Prose is its own poetry. |
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"Mature experience of enduring marital love...." NOT - |
The Maytrees: A Novel Review |
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The Maytrees isn't the great American novel.
I started reading Dillard's book eagerly, but began to stumble over some of the words. Dictionary in hand, the early chapters held my attention despite the obscure vocabulary. I'm from the Midwest and have no personal experience with life on Cape Cod, but I found I could "see" some of what Dillard wanted me to see. I found the characters eccentric and off-putting. Initially, I found the main characters, Toby and Lou charming. But none of the characters were ever fully vetted to make me feel like I knew them or could care about them. While some of Dillard's sentences are exceptionally beautiful and poetic, I had a problem with the credibility of the story. It doesn't ring true. I have been married for 40 years and think I know something about a mature enduring marital relationship. I know that when people love each other, they do not run off with another woman or another man. Enduring mature love means they would never hurt their own child by disappearing, never attempting to contact that child. Toby is immature and selfish. The audacity, then, of him returning after 20 years of silence expecting to find, what? There is no history of enduring love between Toby and Lou...it just isn't credible. Surprisingly it was a person of the cloth who recommended Dillard's Maytrees. Maybe he was persuaded that there was a meaningful lesson and loving relationship here because Lou forgives Toby and is magnanimous in her willingness to care for her husband's second wife. Lou had moved on with her life and had already forgiven Toby. She had freed herself of constraints both real and imagined that her marriage to Toby represented. I find it hard to believe she would be so quick to slide back into a "wifely" role to the person who had caused her and her child so much heartache. I think this is a male fantasy of sorts, that when they have tired of their mistake, they can come home again. Toby looks silly with his two broken arms and extreme expectation of love from the woman he spurned. Dillard disappoints me for suggesting this is even credible. I was disappointed too that Toby and Lou's son, Pete, isn't given a chance to sort through much of anything that helps enlighten anyone. An enduring marital relationship takes into account how the children will suffer because of one's selfish behavior. Dillard is mostly silent about the damage done to Pete. First Pete is angry---then suddenly, Pete forgives his father? How does he work through all that? Overall, characterization in this book is minimal at best. The only redeeming feature about Dillard's novel is the often beautiful poetry of her descriptions of Cape Cod. But I cannot recommend this book, unless you are willing to take a course in philosophy, and mythology, and carry an archaic English dictionary with you wherever you go. I did not find The Maytrees an enjoyable read. I would not have finished it if I had not been part of a reading group. When the English language becomes inaccessible to college educated readers, just what has the author really accomplished? And what in the world has the reader learned...in The Maytrees, certainly nothing about a mature, enduring marital relationship. |
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Once more and ever -  |
The Maytrees: A Novel Review |
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It was long ago that I bought the book, on a long, lone roadtrip southwest, in a favorite bookstore alongside the Rockies. I held it, carried it, kept it on my coffeetable, my nightstand, prolonging the sweet anticipation, knowing the coming reward. I have been (no hyperbole) in awe of Annie Dillard from the first encounter, decades ago, with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (winning Dillard the Pulitzer Prize). Finally, oh finally, picking up what I expect may be her final novel (I heard her interview on NPR at the very beginning of my trip southwest, in which she spoke of the arthritis in her fingers, the agony of the mechanics of writing), now immersed in the solitude of a retreat, I read. I read throughout the day, into the night, until I was done.
Yet never done. Dillard's ability to evoke light from dark, to remind us in an age when books wane in entertainment value against modern technology, of the divine in artistic creation, is, still, without comparison. I remain in awe of her gift. For half a century of bookworming, I have yet to find an author who can stand beside her. See, nothing much happens. That in itself enthralls me. The literary master can paint a scene with words, leave out the excess of action (how I tire of it in our current entertainment venues) and the bore of high drama, yet evoke in us the deepest emotion, eventual revelation. Consider these opening lines in the prologue of the novel, introducing us to the Maytrees, a couple living on the very hook of Cape Cod, in Provincetown, the bohemian town of charming misfits and artists: "The Maytrees' lives, the Nausets', played out before the backdrop of fixed stars. The way of the world could be slight, then and now, but rarely, among individuals, vicious. The slow heavens marked hours. They lived often outside. They drew every breath from a wad of air just then crossing from saltwater to saltwater. Their sandspit was a naked strand between two immensities, both given to special effects." And so we enter the lives of these two, from their meeting in their youth, to the unfolding of their love, to its unfolding (not breaking), as Toby Maytree leaves his wife, Lou (along with their small child, Petie), for her best friend (flaky, flashy, and flirty), Deary Hightoe. Only to return again when both near the end of their lives, and not without Deary (who somehow manages to remain humorously oblivious to how she has affected these two in what for her seems to be on the level of a change in scenery). Because by then, when Toby needs, when his world wavers, when his second wife falls fatally ill, and he himself equally so, where should he go but to the woman he knew he could depend upon, always. All of this against fixed stars. All of this against the backdrop of slow heavens. Dillard never falls into a trap, never gets sucked into making the common, common. Without once naming the pain in Lou's heart at this infidelity, she still conveys its shattering. Its enduring. Its opening again in the wisdom of women. We sense only how this feminine wisdom and patience and strength is what holds the slow heavens in place. Why foolish acts fail to make the stars fall from that fixed place. And she does it with the precision of a poet. While Dillard's dialogue is spare and infrequent, when she does use it, she allows the Maytrees to convey all we need to know in a quick moment, then moves on. When the errant once-husband returns home, now an old man, asking Lou's help to care for his ill wife, Deary, and him, this potential land mine moment becomes an elegant ballet: "Not going to slug me?" "I considered it, when Petie was a baby and you wore earplugs." "Earplugs? I don't remember any earplugs. Actually, I ran off with Deary." "I did notice that. You brute. Get some sleep." "You're wonderfully ..." She growled and he stopped. He was treating her like a stranger who was helping him change a tire. Not that the fractures of a shattered heart were gone. Such wounds remain forever. Alone in her bed, her once-husband sleeping in the next room, Lou lies awake, tossed by the waves of twenty-year old ache. Such is love, however, if real. She remains loyal in the face of disloyalty, and so we witness what never wins medals, rarely receives acknowledgement or reward, but is the axis of a universe tossed by whim and impulse and sheer human stupidity. A kind of loyalty in Toby returns, too, as if back on its compass needle to this, his north star. After Deary passes, Lou cares for Toby as he, too, grows ever more ill. Finally, he is bedridden, and because he had always so loved the ocean crashing against the spit of sand, there on the tip of the hook of Cape Cod, Lou moves his bed outside their graying, old house. They sleep together on the deck, under those same stars, to the sound of incoming and outgoing waves. She holds his hand. She reads to him. They trace together the patterns of constellations. "Lou lay beside him, silent as bandages, her immense solitude so gloriously - he might say, for who will fault a dying man's diction? - broached. 'I wither slowly in thine arms, here at the quiet limit of the world.' She got up to stretch her long dress, and his body drooped to the low and midgey spot she left warm ... Around him her body, sawgrass, trash, seas, and skies altered, reeled, and gave way to dark..." It is impossible to read Dillard without being changed. Moved. Transcended to a place where, for a too short moment, the stars reel around us, then move back into their rightful place, again. |
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One of my Favorite Books Ever - |
The Maytrees: A Novel Review |
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This novel is right up there among my favorites, along with Gilead and Housekeeping, both by Marilynne Robinson. I love Annie Dillard's spare and lyrical style. Each sentence is lovingly crafted to say exactly what it means to say in such a beautiful way. I plan to keep this book in the glove box of my car so that whenever I get lost, I can pull it out to read and become reconnected with the most important themes in life--bonds of love and friendship, loss and solitude, forgiveness, the ordinary acts of caring for other people that somehow become extraordinary when viewed through a larger scope. This book gives me hope that I will somehow find my way. |
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