The Maytrees By Annie Dillard

Donald

I got myself in a snit over the review in the NY Times Book Review and sent the editor the following:

To the Editor:

Certainly Annie Dillard’s new novel, The Maytrees, deserved a more perceptive — indeed, a more proficient — reader than Ms. Reed (July 29). One wonders if she has ever considered the punning irony of her name, as she managed to stumble upon the key sentences of the novel under review, failed to recognize their import, and then admitted in print to being unable to parse them.

“Then there are passages that not even the O.E.D. could help me with,” says Ms. Reed, quoting: “Falling in love, like having a baby, rubs against the current of our lives: separation, loss, and death. That is the joy of them.” Ms. Dillard’s novel explores these “against the current” forces of romantic and parental love on level after level. An astute reader would have understood that the child of the titular couple would have “alewife thoughts” — another phrase Ms. Reed claimed not to understand — as alewives swim “against the current” to “fall in love” and “have babies.” That such sentences and phrases were salient enough for even Ms. Reed to notice them shows how powerful and perfectly chosen all of Ms. Dillard’s words actually are.

I suggest Ms. Reed spend a bit more time with her trusty dictionaries and The Maytrees. If she starts right at the title, she may find just how deftly and deeply the book is constructed — how under-written. Maytree is, of course, a pun on the Sanskrit word maitri, meaning an abiding loving-kindness without attachment. It is also a common name for the hawthorn tree, suggesting another great American writer who explored themes of love and its dilemmas in New England communities.

Chrissie

The beauty of this story lies in
Annie Dillard's prose and in her ability to capture the love between Lou and Toby Maytree and the friendship between them and their friends. They and their friends are artists and writers. The book is quiet and it is beautiful. The setting is Cape Cod, out in the dunes with the shifting sands, the salty brine and star-lit nights. The war is at times referred to, and by that is meant the Second World War. It is over and done with--except in fleeting memories that remain.

Before picking up the book I read that Dillard's non-fiction books were superior to her fiction. I disagree. Some say the relationships are not believable. Here too, I fail to agree. It is said that Toby and Lou n-e-v-e-r argue. It is true that they are not of the yelling sort, but they do certainly have their disagreements. That they perhaps do not yell and scream, says nothing about the hurt they inflict on each other. Some readers want action and momentum. Here the movement is slow and gradual but powerful nevertheless.

This is a book about Toby and Lou and their friends. We follow them from when they first meet until .....well, you will see. I will tell you this--they have a son called Pete and he marries and has a son too. This is a book about love and friendship and living out in the dunes. It has utterly gorgeous writing.

The writing captures how a person thinks. One thought leads to another and another and another. This means you must pay attention. If your mind wanders you will be lost. It is almost impossible to predict in what direction thoughts will flow.

There is not much more I can say...... except I can tell you that halfway through I toyed with the idea of starting all over again from the beginning when I had reached the end. I didn’t because the end is excruciatingly sad. I just could not read through it twice. I would recommend others to read it very slowly the first time around. Suck on the lines, enjoy them and consider all the ways they can be interpreted. Now, knowing each of the characters and how it will end, I might pick it up again sometime in the future. When listening to the audiobook you scarcely have adequate time to contemplate the different ways the lines can be interpreted. The audiobook I listened to was narrated by David Rasche. I cannot fault either the clarity of his words or the tempo with which he read the lines, but I do feel that the lines are so beautiful and so pregnant with ideas that it is better to read the paper book than to listen to the audiobook if you can. The narration I have given three stars.

An American Childhood, I also gave five stars.
Annie Dillard's writing fits me to a tee. I do recommend you try one of her books.

Zinta

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.

Kendall

It's hard to know what to make of this book; you can let yourself to be taken in by its beautiful prose and wallow in its lyricism; or to delight in the precise, glowing descriptions of landscapes and seascapes and emotional states-of-mind. But if you're into creating writing, perhaps not as a course but you have internalized its rules from reading too much genre, you may be angry that Dillard breaks all the rules: she mostly tells rather than shows (never mind that the telling is luminous). And her timeline is chaotic, like she threw darts at a fifty-year calender. Yet, she starts at the beginning and ends at the end--not unlike our lives and how we think about them. Moralists may also have a problem with the unpunished betrayal at the center of the story. There is even a central cliché, never stated but implicit his the book's arch, that men follow sex and women follow their hearts.

Then there is Dillard's problem (that exercised a NYTimes reviewer) of not restricting herself to words readers learned in high school. Dillard does use BIG words, though I don't what that means since they all take up the same space the dictionary. Undiscovered describes them better, and Dillard shows us what wondrous treasures they can be.

Skylar Burris

"Why surprise?" "Is all fair?" "Is love blind?" "Why sadder but wiser?" "What else could wisdom be?" These are some of Annie Dillard's profound questions in Maytrees. Here are some of mine: What is pomposity? Why care? Are big words better than more appropriate small words? Whither quotation marks? Will you ever stop asking short, choppy questions and tell a readable story?

While I recognized a few short flashes of genius in the writing (some touches of real beauty, occasional moments of poetry, and select insights into human life), I had to stop reading at page 86. I might not have minded how pretentious the book was if only it weren't so boring, if only I had been made to care even slightly about the characters. The characters, however, seem to float about the story like disembodies souls.

I'm not averse to a diverse vocabulary, but some words seemed to be selected solely for their "look at this big word I'm using" value. Then there is the author's refusal to use quotation marks for dialogue, which were invented for a very good purpose: they allow readers to easily judge when speech begins and ends, so that dialogue never appears to flow into narration. Insisting on nonconformity in this matter only punishes the reader in exchange for what—a little self-satisfaction for the author who is presumably bucking the system? The book begins as what looks to be a love story, and then the protagonist, who seemed a decent man, suddenly abandons his wife for no good reason. We do not see the deterioration of the marriage: we just see the abrupt move. Everything seems aimed at an appearance of profundity; but too often, it is just that: an appearance.

The book has a gentle, sad tone; I'm sure it requires a great deal of talent to sustain this mood throughout, but I just don't like the book. Chalk it up to pure personal preference. The vague bleakness of it all…it just makes me YAWN.

Sarah

Annie Dillard is simply the best living creative non-fiction writer. She has the rare ability to put common experiences and abstract emotions into words, and the structure and beauty of her sentences are pretty well unrivaled. If you don’t believe me, pick up An American Childhood or Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – both books about everyday experiences that Dillard makes wondrous. Over the years, I think I’ve read every nonfiction book she’s written.

Still, can she write fiction? The Maytrees is her second fictive effort after The Living and the only novel by Dillard that I’ve read. It follows a couple who lives on Cape Cod through the 50 years of their relationship and explores how and why people love. The couple has a child, the man runs away with another woman,
the other woman dies, the man comes back. Nothing revolutionary plot-wise.

First, let me say I liked it. The description of Provincetown is lovely and Dillard does what she does best: dissects little moments and little thoughts and puts words to feelings that we’ve never been able to find words for. Her sentences are as lovely as always and the story almost has the feel of a long poem.

On the other hand, it’s pretty clear that fiction isn’t Dillard’s strong suit. The largest problem I had involved simply understanding the story – much more attention is put toward how things are going on instead of what’s going on. There were many passages I had to read twice just to get the logistics of what was happening, and I don’t think Dillard meant for it to be confusing. There were several places were the numbers simply didn’t work (the main character’s age is wrong in several places, for instance, which immediately throws me out the reality of the world she’s created) and there were several places that didn’t make sense for hundreds of places (one passage in the first ten pages makes you think that a character is murdered, when in fact she dies of old age 200 pages later) and again, these confusing bits of writing didn’t seem to be there on purpose.

In the end, if you’re an Annie Dillard fanatic, this is worth picking up, just to be in awe of some of her sentences and to read her descriptions of the New England Coast. If you haven’t read much Dillard, I might skip this one in favor of one of her nonfiction books – although it isn’t unenjoyable, it does show that Dillard is much better at exploring our own world than at creating her own.

Richard Derus

Real Rating: 2.5* of five, rounded up because
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I wasn't planning to revisit this book. I have a tree-book of it, and as I am the one who hooked my Young Gentleman Caller on Author Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (his comment: "Fuck
WaldenWalden! This is what {nature writing} should be!"), when he was Kindleshopping here this afternoon and saw this was $1.99, I said he could take the tree-book and not spend the money. We flipped through it together for a while....

Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else's, but their many experiences having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying, they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human nature—as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance.

That made us both laugh out loud. I mean, given where I am, I'm in a position to say "oh HELL yeah" to the truth imbued in that. And Rob, since he actually seeks my company out, asks me things, and *listens* when I answer (!!), is au fait with it, too. (I preen a little that he speaks without scorn of them, exasperating as they are; he commented once that I was not to plan to go down that road or he'd biff me one.)

But that, most regrettably, was as good as it got.

If she…had known how much her first half-inch beginning to let go would take—and how long her noticing and renouncing owning and her turning her habits, and beginning the slimmest self-mastery whose end was nowhere in sight—would she have begun?
–and–
What was it she wanted to think about? Here it was, all she ever wanted: a free mind. She wanted to figure out. With which unknown should she begin? Why are we here, we four billion equals who seem significant to ourselves alone? She rejected religion. She knew Christianity stressed the Ten Commandments, Jesus Christ as the only son of God who walked on water and rose up after dying on the cross, the Good Samaritan, and cleanliness is next to godliness. Buddhism and Taoism could handle all those galaxies, but Taoism was self-evident—although it kept slipping her mind—and Buddhism made you just sit there. Judaism wanted her like a hole in the head. And religions all said—early or late—that holiness was within. Either they were crazy or she was. She had looked long ago and learned: not within her. It was fearsome down there, a crusty cast-iron pot. Within she was empty. She would never poke around in those terrors and wastes again, so help her God.

We kept reading to each other (I've made my hmmfyness about that well-known, but ya know what? it's different when you're in love with the reader! Go know from this shocking revelation, right?) as the hours ticked by and after about two were spent, we silently agreed to stop.

It's in the Little Free Library if anyone wants to go get it. So very disappointing.

Victoria

Sometime last fall, I read a review of this book in which the reviewer criticized Dillard's arcane and at times unintelligable syntax. I remember the reviewer essentially quoting an entire paragraph, then writing "What does this mean?" I began this book committed to proving the reviewer wrong. At first, I was worried. Too many passages were bewildering, vague, and opaque. But as I got going, I began to appreciate Dillard's willingness to leave things unexplained, to let some phrases and sentences function as enigmas. In this way, the book seemed almost sculptural to me, rather than two-dimensional. I don't think it always worked, but I appreciate her attempt to use language to build something, to balance words on top of each other, to experiment with unusual word orders that conveyed more of a feeling than a literal meaning. I ended up loving the book, loving the characters and their mystery, loving the descriptions of the dunes and the sky above the ocean. Loving everything she left out as well as included.

Janet

This was a book so fine I started it several times and found I couldn't write at all when I was reading it, its beauty and mastery absolutely paralyzed me. I had to wait until my work was done and I had time (and self-isolation) to hear its quiet, reasonable voice. The story of a marriage between two quiet people over forty years by the great writer's writer, Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Writers Life, Living by Fiction).

Set on the windswept dunes of Cape Cod, Maytree, a rawboned poet when the book begins, just after WW2, falls in love with quiet, tall New England beauty Lou, in those days often mistaken for Ingrid Bergman. What follows is a deep meditation on love over a lifetime--in just over 200 pages. They have a child, who grows into a man. Other characters emerge from the salty town--a bohemian woman who sleeps in the sand or on people's porches, Deary, and much loved older women, Reevadere, and a host of artists who Provincetown draws with its simplicity and its light.

This book is an absolute miracle.

Here is their baby, Petie: "Now between his parents outside the shack on a blanket, Petie raised his head. He unfurled an arm and placed a boneless hand on his father's forearm He had shed that clouds-of-glory, that leaving-of-fairies glaze by which newborn people keep parents in thrall till other charms appear. Like his mother, he did not say much. His eyes gleamed dark beneath low brows, and everything struck him as funny."

Their early love:
"Maytree, flexed beside her, was already asleep. He usually fell asleep as if dropped from a scarp. From above he would look as if his parachute failed. Intimacy could not be unique to her and Maytree, this brief blending, this blind sea they entered together diving."

Here's Maytree, going out to the beach shack his father built:
"Maytree left town on impulse and headed toward his shack. The panel rolled into its shadow. On the high dune, sky ran down to his ankles. Everything he saw was lower than his socks. Across a long horizon, parabolic dunes cut sky as rogue waves do. The silence of permanence lay on the scene. He found a Cambrian calm as f the world had not yet come; he found a posthumous hush as if humans had gone. he crossed the low swale and climbed a trail his feet felt. He ate a sandwich. Now he knew, but did not believe, she loved him. Her depth he knew when he kissed her. His brain lobes seemed to part like clouds over sun."

Lucy

For a book about love, it's kind of a downer. There are too many exquisite lines to put this into a "waste of time" category, but as a whole, I can't claim this to be a favorite.

What I enjoyed was Dillard's ability to put a unique feel to common experiences. For instance, when Maytree looked at his wife, she wrote, "After their first year or so, Lou's beauty no longer surprised him. He never stopped looking, because her face was his eyes' home."

Or.
"That he did not possess her childhood drove him wild. Who was this impostor she sang with in college -- how dare he?"

Here's a good one:
"A woman's forgiveness weakened a man's arms and back. So did its sob sister, pity. It would not stand up to fight. Who could prevail against it?"

This one is my favorite:
"Often she missed infant Petie now gone -- his random gapes, his bizarre buttocks. How besotted they gazed at each other nose-on-nose. He fit her arms as if they two had invented how to carry a baby.....She imagined joining picnic tables outside by the beach and setting them for 22 Peties and Petes, or 122, or however greedy she was that day and however divisible Pete. Together the sons at every age and size -- scented with diaper, formula on rubber nipples, bike grease, wax crayon...waited for dinner. Who else knew what each liked? It was a hell of a long table. She gave herself a minute to watch them -- Petie after Petie barefoot near his future self and past. They pinched and teased or shoved one another. What mother would not want to see her kids again?"

Now normally I do not give a lot of quotes for a book review. I can't really explain why I did with this particular book, other than I liked these individual lines better than the book as a whole. I confess that I've always had a slight prejudice against east coasters. I don't know exactly why. Again, I like almost all of the individuals I've met, but as a whole, there is a superiority they perceive in themselves in regards to their intellect, experience and perspective that I find irritating. These characters and their beach front way of life irritated me. Their attitudes towards marriage, parenting, etc. frustrated me. I don't know if it was the author's own bias that tainted them, or if it really was isolated to these particular characters, but the choices they made did not match the consequences I felt each choice deserved.

But who am I to say what should befall the fallen? All I can say is I felt unsatisfied at the end. And a little bit like none of it mattered.

Wow. This was a really bad book review. Sorry.

El

In post-war Cape Cod Toby Maytree meets Lou Bigelow and falls in love. They create a life and family, surrounded by friends and adoration for one another. They are a well-educated, well-read, talented couple who do not live to make money but who want to know the full meaning of "love" in all aspects.

It almost sounds hokey.

But Toby ultimately finds what he is looking for outside of Lou and what they have created is torn apart. Their lives and their feelings for each other ebb like the flow of water, their foundation is virtually made of sand. They live on a beach, both literally and figuratively. There is an aspect of unstable stability that Dillard is able to incorporate with her use of the nature surrounding her characters. She is a naturalist first perhaps, a novelist second, but there is poetry in everything she writes. In the story of Toby and Lou their decisions affect each other and those around them, but in the end, despite the hurt inflicted, their history prevails and what happened in the meantime no longer matters.

This one hit a hidden soft spot - something about growing old, friends versus lovers, fear of the unknown - and I'm glad it was Dillard who poked a finger at it.

For everyone else that complained that Dillard used "too many big words", for the love of god, purchase a bloody dictionary and expand your pathetic vocabulary. I would be ashamed to admit to being such a lazy reader.

Ken

I'm a big fan of Annie Dillard's, and I saw this book recommended first in a book by Joe Queenan (
One for the Books) and then on a Boston Globe summer reading list. Jumping genres is a tricky business, though, and the non-fiction champ Dillard doesn't cross over seamlessly to the novel, I don't think.

First of all, the book covers its main characters' entire lifetimes yet weighs in at a mere 216 pp (paperback). This means Dillard is more in "telling" mode than she is "showing" mode. It also means plot is negligible. But characterization, usually the cavalry over the hill in such books, is only so-so. There's a coolness to the young couple Maytree and Lou. And really, do we have to name the female lead "Lou"? It took me about 215 pp. to get used to that.

In the middle of the book, there's an odd jump in time to the character's last years before it returns to its regularly-scheduled program. The reader, choking in the time machine's dust, can only cough "What the...?" before soldiering on.

At least we are treated to some lovely Annie Dillard nature writing. In this case her setting is Provincetown, MA, on the Cape right after the war. Ocean. Sand. Stars. And it helped to read this book in lengthy sittings. Telling books don't hold up so well in short bursts.

Overall, glad I read it, even though I didn't love it.

Laura

Ugh...Dillard says she's not going to write another book as this is, in her opinion, the best work she's ever produced. She cut the manuscript back from 1000+ pages to its present form, which is way too choppy and terse for my liking. This could have been an interesting story about how love changes as people change but the writing made it hard to focus on the narrative and characters!

Cat

I really love Annie Dillard. I cannot express how "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" shook my world, only to say that I refuse to let anyone borrow my worn paperback copy not because I'm worried about not getting it back, but because I am so mortified by some of the 18-year-old thoughts I scribbled in the margins the first time read it. That's how bad it is.

So, it's hard to express my level of disappointment with "The Maytrees." It's a book that is far to contemplative to be fiction, let alone a story about love. Furthermore, the characters are so far in their heads that it's difficult to imagine they are real. (I don't know about you, but good fiction means characters that I can believe in, no matter how fantastical they are.)I say leave the big thoughts for the creek, Annie.

The saving grace of this story, and the reason I give it three stars, is because there are beautiful moments that remind me of why I think Dillard is such a brilliant writer. For example, the main character Lou Maytree is one day thinking about her grown son, Petie. Dillard writes that if Lou could have it her way, she would collect all the Peties that ever existed, ages 0, 2 years, three days and five hours old, 22 years old, and so on and put them in a room together. I can imagine that for most parents, it is difficult to let go of all the incarnations of their children and this passage I found touching and well written.

In the meantime, I've decided to give Tinker another round...

Ellen McGinnis

This book has gotten a lot of good reviews, but I was a little disappointed. I have not read any other books by Annie Dillard - her writing is poetic - maybe too poetic. Sometimes it was just confusing, a bit too "stream-of-consciousness". I became a bit detached - observing myself reading the book, instead of enjoying the book.

That said, it is a pretty good story, a quick read, and I liked it enough to recommend it as a beach read or something to take on a plane or train to pass 3-4 hours.

Sheri

“She could not sleep. Should she pretend to find it all difficult, and not so much a matter of course, to ease his chagrin, or at least to make it seem apt? She declined this ploy as tiresome. Or did he think so poorly of her, and so well of himself, that he fancied his chucking her and Pete for Deary had left her ruined and angry for twenty years? Surely he knew her better than that. Surely!—or else he really would insult her.”

Dillard’s novel attempts to address the questions of romantic, platonic, and familial love; but it is also the story of a really strong, independent woman. Lou was a confirmed bachelorette with property and means of her own in a time when women were supposed to be most vested in finding a man. She was struck suddenly with love for Maytree and her life veered to his. And yet, she was still independent for most of her life. The prologue and the epilogue describe their love story; the middle of the book deals with maternal love and independence.

It was a well thought out character piece, but I was completely floored upon seeing in the afterward that Dillard’s original version was 1200 pages longer. What? The greatness in this book were the moments of brevity; there were times that were so overwritten, overwrought and repetitive that I wanted to stop (even though it is just over 200 pages):
“this blind sea they entered together diving. His neck smelled as suntan does, his own oil heated, and his hair smelled the same but darker.” and “The swale drained the dunes like a vein. She stopped to drink from the almost-permanent pond. There grew archaic plants from the world’s first wags: club mosses, lichens in mounds, puffballs, sea stars, and bug-eating sundews. She stepped over this saurine landscape, and over heather, and started climbing.” are two examples of her repetitive style.

I was also slightly annoyed at the literary drops. The three that were most glaring (all of which I knew, so you aren’t the only erudite person in the room, Ms. Dillard) were Sophocles’s separated single person and the Oblonsky and Howard’s End quotes.

Some of my favorites moments were:

“Among their friends were people who wrote, people who painted, people who taught, people who carved or welded sculptures, and poets barefoot, lefty, and educated to a feather edge….Did the United States have a culture—apart from making money?”

“Perhaps every generation passes to the next, to hand down to yet more children, an untouched trunk of virtues. The adults describe the trunk’s contents to the young and never open it.”

“Old people were not incredulous at having once been young, but at being young for so many decades running.” and “Old people were those who lacked will to leave, or tact to know, when their party was over.”

“Lou heard her telling one trapped painter that intellectuals lacked common sense. She could prove it in two words—natural childbirth. Or how about open marriage?”

“Lou turned to Maytree and saw his firelit pupils deepen to hers. He was letting her in, as always, and holding her there.”

“Maybe lasting love is a rare evolutionary lagniappe. Anthropologists say almost every human culture on earth gives lip service, and lip service only, to monogamy.”

“On the other hand, nothing was more common than courting your wife. How meek you had to be varied with the depth of the particular creek you were up.”

Overall it was a very poetic short novel; well done and astute.

Alicia

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard is a stunning work of fiction, following a couple through their life, both together and apart. I like these kind of novels, where quiet, profound moments lead toward something greater than it's parts.

The author's use of language takes your breath away. She is a truly gifted novel who packs a whole lot of impact into a tiny novel. The sheer depth of this novel is astounding. Absolutely lovely novel.

Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree marry and create a life in Cape Code, beautifully described in this quiet and thoughtful novel of lives intertwined. Lou and Toby meet, marry, have a child and settle into a life of simplicity. While Lou is busy with everyday life, Toby is falling in love and running away with another woman leaving Toby to raise their only child. As the years pass, Lou and Toby move from love to anger to affection and finally, to love. This evocative novel explores the fluidity of time, its effects on love, acceptance and decency all contained within the ordinary experiences of life in this profoundly graceful novel.

Joy D

This is a multigenerational saga about the Maytree family, and is short (under 300 pages) considering it covers such a long time span. Dillard’s writing is beautifully poetic, and her descriptions of place are easily pictured, especially the scenes of sea, shore, swamps, sky, and stars. In one part, she captures a mother’s nostalgia for when her son was a young child, and the bond between the two is wonderfully portrayed. I loved the writing. If I were just rating this based on how it is written, it would be 5 stars.

Unfortunately, the storyline did not quite work for me. A man and woman fall in love, marry, and have a child. The man is a part-time poet. They live in Cape Cod and frequently interact with the Bohemian community of artists who live there. So far, so good. The issue is that it is difficult to understand their motivations. What happened to make their marriage fall apart? How is the wife able to get beyond her husband’s betrayal? She seems to take everything in stride and move forward as if nothing had happened. We are never privy to reasons for their actions. For a beautifully written book, I would expect it to be an emotional read, but I felt disconnected from the characters. I loved the writing but did not feel much for the characters.

Rebecca Russavage

I struggle with anything close to contemporary fiction because so often it’s trying to be something, or recycling social commentary disguised as a story (even when it’s social commentary I agree with, I think the art suffers).

I don’t know that Annie Dillard counts as contemporary fiction, but it’s sure more recent than Edith Wharton. This is all beauty and nothing else. It’s perfect.

Melissa

I can't say I loved or hated this book. It is painfully beautiful. The story is painful to read, and Dillard's exquisite writing makes it even more so. I read most of it on a train from Seattle to Portland in the March rain. It was visceral. I could not finish it on the train, and when I finally did complete it at home, I didn't know how I felt.

The writing is simply beyond praise. I was vaguely dissatisfied with the characters some aspects of the plot. Dillard uses her story to ask and dissect and leave unanswered huge questions about love and longevity and reality and human nature, and does it brilliantly. But there are certain aspects of the story--particularly the ending--that didn't quite resonate with me . . . I don't think.

I will be re-visiting it again this year, now knowing the plot and prepared for it. I haven't had such a strong emotional reaction to an unexpected event in a story since Leslie or Rab or Beth or Dan & Little Ann died. While physical death isn't the plot twist in this story, Dillard's twist elicited that gut-wrenching emotional response you sometimes have to a deeply moving work of fiction.

It's an incredibly worthwhile read, for the beauty of the prose and poignancy of the story. Dillard makes you feel, and while I might be disturbed by the particular feelings this story conjures up, it's powerfully done by one of the most brilliant.

Mark

Toby and Lou Maytree, meet, fall in love and marry, in post-war Cape Cod. The second half of the novel, shows them drifting apart. Much of Dillard's prose is lovely but the tone of the book feels cool and aloof. The characters are kept at a distance. Silhouettes. I wanted more depth and feeling. This may work better in poetry but I don't think it fits here, although other readers have praised this novel highly.
I loved Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, so I wonder if she writes better nonfiction. I did not dislike it. I just wanted more.

Melinda

John Hess says this is a once in 10 years book...and now that I've finished, I agree with him. It's hard to even start to describe my response to this book. Annie Dillard is a master of elegant, but simple phrasing and word choices, there is poetry in the total of her writing. Her characters become real, her landscape becomes your own. Her ability to weave in love, loss, forgiveness, hope - the human condition -that's what will stay with me.

Doug H

Somewhat disappointing. Hard to believe this came from the same author as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Barb H

I could not fault Dillard for her writing, but this book failed to capture me. Perhaps I should have continued further, but I am now abandoning it.

Michelle

Annie Dillard, my goodness this is a beautiful companion to your Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I feel blessed and lucky to have been able to read both at your Hollins.

This is the perfect novel to give me the exact kind of hope that I need right now. Breathtaking

Poiema

Is Annie Dillard a philosopher? A poet? A naturalist? Or a storyteller?
It's difficult to determine by the reading of her most recently penned novel, The Maytrees. Of those four distinctions, Annie's storytelling seems to be the weakest, apparently used only as a vehicle by which she might display her other gifts.

The novel is billed as a love story, the romantic history of Lou and Toby Maytree. Dialogue is spare, almost non-existent. In its place we are invited to share the inner ruminatings of the poet Toby and the quiet Lou as they seek their entire adult lives to make sense of love, the shortness of life, and the big questions: How do we make our brief moments count? What is it we are meant to do? Does love come as a gift, or is it an act of will?

I could follow some of the philosophical threads in the story but kept feeling that I was not grasping enough to make sense of it. Is beauty enough? What happens to our cache of knowledge and experience when we die? I felt unsatisfied when the main characters did not come to any final conclusions. The threads of thought seemed never to be woven together, but were left to dangle so that at the end I was left with a big question mark.

The story line was not compelling, the characters were not fully developed, the philosophy was tangled and enigmatic. So what kept me reading this story?

I suppose in the end it was the love of words that kept me reading, because while Annie lacks as a storyteller, she more than compensates as a wordsmith. Her descriptions of the Cape Cod beach, the flora, the fauna, the night sky, the dunes--paint a multi-layered work of beauty, stroke-by-stroke. She has an unusual way of turning words, rather poetical, which for me required slow reading and focused attention.

I'm including some of the quotes that stood out to me.

Will I read more of Annie Dillard? I might read her almost classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek because I know that to be her thoughts on nature, where she truly excels as a writer. But another novel? No.

The quotes:

Of Lou, the quiet woman:

"After their first year or so, Lou's beauty no longer surprised him. He never stopped looking, because her face was his eyes' home."

"Her mental energy and endurance matched his. She neither competed nor rebelled. Her freedom strengthened him, as did her immeasurable reserve."

Of Maytree, the poet:

"He endorsed Edwin Arlington Robinson's view that anthologies preserve poems by pickling their corpses."

Other:

"What gave adults the cheer to tolerate their hypocrisy? Even his mother praised generosity and hoarded; she preached industry and barely worked. Perhaps every generation passes to the next, to hand down to yet more children, an untouched trunk of virtues. The adults describe the trunk's contents to the young and never open it."

On beauty:

"In her last years Lou puzzled over beauty....She never knew what to make of it. Certainly nothing in Darwin, in chemical evolution, in optics or psychology or even cognitive anthropology gave it a shot. (snip) Philosophy ...had trivialized itself right out of the ballpark. Nothing rose to plug the gap, to address what some called 'ultimate concerns' unless you count the arts, the arts that lacked both epistemological methods and accountability..." -------->

This last quote makes me so thankful for the gift of faith. My faith "plugs the gap" and although some would call it simplistic, I'm grateful that it keeps me from the tortured mental gymnastics that must weary great minds devoid of faith. Keep me simple.

Nathaniel Dean

I'm glad I wasn't the only one who bothered to look up pauciloquy on page 70, and was bothered to note that this $110.00 word meaning "brevity of speech" was not only archaic (as of 1913) and misspelled (Dillard spells it "pauciloquoy"), but also not as good a word choice as "terseness" IMHO. Not only does this word describe Lou's character to a T, but also describes the writing style in this book that pretends to be a poem, but happily is not.

So the book is a bit decadent in word choice and meter (Dillard even uses Joyce's -- to indicate quotation and she unfortunately borrowed his habit for omitting speaker). As seen above, it makes for great teasing (almost prepared a menu of expensive words she uses in the book for the book club meeting). But unlike Danielewski's latest obsfucation, Dillard's book is highly readable (well, after the first 30 pages of nearly unbearable fawning) and makes for some stirring prose. Sometimes the narrator or characters will say these really great one-liners that take you aback, and make you think hard about what Maytree, Lou, Deary, Pete are feeling in each scene. For being a "quick read" I sure had to think a lot to read the book, and that's a good sign.

I think that the most unnerving part of this book is that it traverses the three main character's lives bow to stern, which wouldn't be as disturbing as it is when she describes their death. Granted, I don't take the concept of death and dying well, regardless of how many books I've read that bring it up. But describing how these people die hour by hour really catches me offguard; I and most of everyone I know will die in similar fashion.

In short, this book is wonderfully written. I'd probably have given it four stars if it were more up my alley.

Shaindel

I *just* finished reading this book, and I'm sure I've got to let it resonate a bit. First, let me say, this is an important book to read. Annie Dillard is doing something really interesting here, but I'm not sure quite what it is--which is part of the quiet and beauty of the novel.

There is one plot twist at the beginning (which I won't give away), but I think it was a brave direction for Dillard to take. At some times, I liked the "distance" from the characters. They live in their heads, and we feel rather detached from them; but at the same time, it's something that makes the novel difficult to get into. There are those novels that you can't put down, and this wasn't one of them until after the first hundred pages, perhaps. I think that Dillard is doing something philosophical with the emotional distance we feel from the characters, but it makes The Maytrees difficult to get into at first.

The thing that is the strength and weakness of the novel at the same time is Dillard's poetic use of language. Sometimes it's beautiful:

--Let's pretend we're old, Lou remembered saying back when they were young. They had been watching hurricane waves rip the outer beach. To walk back they aligned adjacent legs like a pair in a three-legged race.

--Those days will come soon enough, Maytree said. His gravity had startled her. Now those days were here. (206).

And sometimes the poetic language is SO distracting. There are sentences with internal rhyme in them that will sometimes make you feel like you're in a madhouse.

Still, it's an important book to read. I can't explain it. I just know.

Title	:	The Maytrees
Author	:	Annie Dillard
Rating	:
ISBN	:	0061239534
ISBN-10	:	9780061239533
Language	:	English
Format Type	:	Hardcover
Number of Pages	:	216
Publication	:	First published June 12, 2007
Awards	:	PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (2008)

The Maytrees Reviews

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