If you are looking for quick summer reading, forget Annie Dillard’s “The Maytrees.” If you are a lover of language, ambiguity and strange philosophical thoughts tossed in with wayward prose; or if you are already a fan of Dillard’s, you’ll love her new novel, “The Maytrees.”
Dillard is mostly known for her nature writing and essays – she has published nearly a dozen books on the subject and won a Pulitzer Prize for “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” a series of essays about the natural world.
“The Maytrees” is only Dillard’s second novel. Her first, “The Living,” was published in 1992. As usual, she is unorthodox in all things related to writing. Chronology is all mixed up, philosophy is favored over plot and language is abstract. The characters, though, are fascinating and that is a good thing because there wouldn’t be a story otherwise.
Toby Maytree is a 30-year-old carpenter and poet who “hauled lines of poetry like buried barbed wire with his bare hands.”
He meets 23-year-old Lou Bigelow: “A red scarf, white shirt, skin clean as eggshell, wide eyes and mouth, shorts … flexible figure … Because everyone shows up in Provincetown sooner or later, he had taken her at first for Ingrid Bergman.”
Together they are bohemians living in the dunes of Provincetown. They meet, fall in love and read books separately but together, “he read for facts, she for transport.” Their life seems idyllic until Maytree, not so interested in Petie, their baby boy, and since “Lou’s beauty no longer surprised him,” leaves them both after 12 years of marriage.
He moves to Maine to have an affair with a friend of theirs, but “free-spirited Deary forbade him her bed.” They set up house, get rich and get old together. “At that age, couples patted the remains of each other’s hands on porches” but he was still pondering everlasting love.
Lou treats his leaving as no big production, saying, “This sort of thing happens all the time.” She moves on and passes her time mostly by painting seascapes. She spends her time well: “Everyone envied her the time she had, not noticing that they had equal time.”
In an effort to follow in the path of Diogenes, she let go of people she didn’t like, ironing, fashion and all radio (except for Red Sox broadcasts) and “hoped scandalously to live her own life.” All in all, she’s content.
Petie becomes a fisherman and remembers his father – mostly his leaving: “Long ago when he was a boy he tried to talk himself out of hating his father … It worked for a while until the years piled up.”
Eventually they reunite, when Petie himself has a son, but the relationship never really jells and is left hanging like a worm on a hook.
When Deary falls ill, she refuses to see doctors, believing they kill their patients, and since hospitals are “strictly for profit,” she prefers to get rollerskates rather than become a statistic.
Maytree is a broken man – literally. His body is a mass of broken bones and he needs help taking care of Deary since he can’t do it himself. Thinking of no one else to turn to, Maytree goes to Lou, who, true to character, helps. The rest of the novel is all love story; the philosophical questions surrounding love, why love ends and why it endures, the essence of love more than love itself.
“The Maytrees” is first about language and how it can be manipulated, then it’s about the Maytrees, but through it all, love is what remains. Like Maytree and his poetry: “In all his work he avoided sentimental topics, say love and grief … But they came along didn’t they,” Dillard, says, coming full circle.
Dillard isn’t for everyone, and “The Maytrees” is a tough read. It takes patience, time and endurance, much like living in those dunes she describes so well. The story must be navigated and trudged through. When the time is taken, it is worth every minute.
Renee Warner is a freelance writer in Atlanta.
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FICTION
The Maytrees
By Annie Dillard
$24.95
