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Summary
Summary
"Brilliant. . . . A shimmering meditation on the ebb and flow of love." -- New York Times
"In her elegant, sophisticated prose, Dillard tells a tale of intimacy, loss and extraordinary friendship and maturity against a background of nature in its glorious color and caprice. The Maytrees is an intelligent, exquisite novel." -- The Washington Times
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. 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.
Author Notes
Annie Dillard was born Annie Doak in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on April 30, 1945. She received a B.A and an M.A. in English from Hollins College. She writes both fiction and nonfiction books including Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk, The Living, and Mornings Like This: Found Poems. She won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She wrote an autobiography entitled An American Childhood. Her work also has appeared in such periodicals as The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and Cosmopolitan. She taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Lou Bigelow meets her husband-to-be, Toby Maytree, when Toby returns to Provincetown following WWII. In the house Lou inherits from her mother, they read, cook soup, play games with friends, vote and raise a child. Toby writes poetry and does odd jobs; Lou paints. Their unaffected bohemianism fits right in with the Provincetown landscape, which Dillard, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, describes with an offhand but deep historical sense. Years into the marriage, Toby suddenly decamps to Maine with another local woman, Deary Hightoe; flash forward six years to Lou reading Toby's semimonthly letters (and Deary's marginal notes) "with affectionate interest." Dillard, stripping the story to bare facts-plus-backdrop, is after something beyond character and beyond love, though she evokes Lou and Toby's beautifully. Thus, when Deary's heart falters 20 years later and Toby brings her home to Lou for hospice care, Lou puts up water for tea and gets going. She feels too much, not too little, for mere drama, although people who don't know her misread her. In short, simple sentences, Dillard calls on her erudition as a naturalist and her grace as poet to create an enthralling story of marriage-particular and universal, larky and monumental. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Dillard, a member in good standing of the school of Emerson and Thoreau, reads the living world with the elevated attention accorded sacred texts. This habit of mind shapes her prized nonfiction, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) to For the Time Being (1999), and underlies her fiction, first, in The Living (1992), a historical saga set in the Pacific Northwest. And now in this rhapsodic novel of our times set on Cape Cod and portraying free-spirited characters dazzled by the sea, stars, sun, wind, and dunes. Deary, a country-club escapee, sleeps in the sand's cradling embrace. Poet Toby Maytree cherishes the beach shack his coast guard father built, which is where he takes beautiful and meditative Lou, launching a epic love. Dillard's gift for combining scientific precision with soul-stirring lyricism has never been more beguiling and philosophically resonant. Can Lou and Maytree's seaside idyll last? Yes and no. Broken bones and broken promises do not altogether slay love, or dispel osmotic understanding. The ocean gives, takes, gives back. Lou is an anchorite, free of clock time and clutter, devoted to the story of the land. Maytree is a voyager who, in old age, returns home. In this mythic and transfixing tale, Dillard wryly questions notions of love, exalts in life's metamorphoses, and celebrates goodness. As she casts a spell sensuous and metaphysical, Dillard covertly bids us to emulate may trees--the resilient hawthorn--the tree of joy, of spring, of the heart. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ANNIE DILLARD reads - a lot. She is also very big on any activity that will heighten awareness (this does not include television, which we watch and "miss the show"). She thinks a writer's desk should face a wall, not a window, and finds "putting a book together" both "interesting and exhilarating." In pursuit of her craft she has filled up countless journals, taken lots of walks, communed at length with nature and holed up in: a cinder block room overlooking a parking lot; the second floor of an empty student library in Virginia; a cabin on an island in Puget Sound; and a paint-filled pine shed on Cape Cod. I know all this from her books, principally the 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" and also "The Writing Life," a sort of memoir cum handbook in which she sets out to tell "the complex story" of the writer's "mind at work" and exhorts fellow artists to "examine all things intensely and relentlessly." That book is both pompous (Shakespeare and Tolstoy, we learn, were driven by "powerful hearts," not "powerful wills") and redundant (the best evidence of a writer's mind is generally the work itself). But it is also the kind of stuff that makes most other writers feel guilty (see above). When I pulled it off my shelf I noticed that I had placed it next to "Those Drinking Days," a memoir by Donald Newlove, a novelist and recovering alcoholic who includes chapters on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Williams and the rest of the usual suspects. There is more than one way to skin a cat. But Dillard does not want a refuge from her own head; she tends to value contemplative pleasures over bodily ones. So she persists in contemplating: "Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts?" she asks - and asks and asks - in "The Writing Life." "Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?" I have yet to make it through that paragraph without losing interest, but I know what she's talking about - it's what you get when you read Chekhov, except that with Chekhov, you are never, ever privy to the machinations of the writerly mind. Shelby Foote once wrote to Walker Percy: "How he does it is a mystery you can't solve by analyzing it - he just does it; does it out of being Chekhov." Percy agrees: "Nothing short of miraculous." In both the writing and the miracle businesses, the problem arises when you can see how it's being done, when you are conscious of wheels squeaking and neurons firing, trying their damnedest to "illuminate and inspire," and Dillard can be especially susceptible. In her new novel, "The Maytrees," a meditation on love set on Cape Cod from World War II to the present, there is some of the familiar straining, along with constant evidence of her energetic reading. The gang's all here, including, but not remotely limited to: Diogenes, Tiresias, Plato and Aristotle; Blake and Kafka; Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Louis Stevenson; Vietnamese legend and prehistoric Aleuts; Wittgenstein, Galileo and, of course, Tolstoy. (When the subject is love, Levin must be summoned.) She reads the dictionary, too. There are no mere ragamuffins in Dillard, only a "tatterdemalion"; the tone of a man's calf muscle is, here, the "tonus." It was heartening in a way to find that she had spelled "pauciloquy" wrong, but even in its correct form, the Oxford English Dictionary deems its usage "rare." Rarer still is "epistomeliac" - I could find it nowhere but I did learn that an epistome is an appendage in front of the mouth in Crustacea and certain insects. Then there are the passages that not even the O.E.D. could help me with. "Falling in love, like having a baby, rubs against the current of our lives: separation, loss and death. That is the joy of them." One character's "alewife thoughts" include visions of himself "and others" who "roamed the world feeding or vaccinating people, palpating mastitis in zebus." When Eudora Welty reviewed "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" in these pages, she quoted one passage and wrote, "I honestly do not know what she is talking about at such times." This, too, is a relief. I flip through my galleys of "The Maytrees" and find a half-dozen red question marks I made in the margins, bewildered and slightly irritated, but in good company at least. The good news is that in "The Maytrees," despite the big words and the name-dropping, despite remnants of what Welty called the "receptivity so high-strung and high-minded" on display in "Pilgrim," there is also good old straight narrative and prose that is often, yes, breathtakingly illuminative. Most important, in the book's central couple, Lou and Toby Maytree, as well as their motley group of Cape Cod friends, she gives us actual characters. In "The Writing Life," there is no one (if we don't count the endless dead writers) but a stunt pilot she flies with in the last chapter to break the monotony of the mind. In "Pilgrim," she encounters many more moths and muskrats than people. There, the endless musings are all her own, but here they are in the mouths of other people - blessedly quirky, funny, interesting other people. Like their creator, they read like crazy (between them, the Maytrees alone go through "about 300 books a year"), walk a lot, study the stars and exhaust themselves with all kinds of rigorous thinking, but they get to have sex (beware the bodily pleasures!) and at least one or two of them enjoy a cocktail. There is even the occasional mention of a meal, though the menus mostly involve clams and kale. They are not only enough to save the book - from the author herself, in a way - but they are also infused with such life that they make it a near great one. When the story opens, Lou, a sometime painter, and Toby, a poet and house mover, fall intensely, almost instantly in love, and thereafter the phases of such a state are examined. In their early, heady days together, Lou, "shipwrecked on the sheets," "opened her eyes and discovered where on their bed she had fetched up." In her impassioned innocence, "love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature?" Likewise, a "wider life" breathed in Toby. "Only the lover sees what is real, he thought. ... Far from being blind, love alone can see." But then, as these things go, a beloved child, Petie, is born, Toby turns 42 ("the most dangerous age," according to the Japanese - who knew?) and takes up with Deary, a close friend and "hoyden" who is given to sleeping on the beach. Lou falls apart and gets it back together by making daily treks to Pilgrim Monument, where, "for one minute by her watch, she imagined liking Maytree impartially." She makes like Diogenes and cleans house, giving up ironing, stuff she doesn't need and people she doesn't like. "With those blows she opened her days like a piñata." Toby stays with Deary long after passion has subsided, mostly to make "reparations to the moral universe," and mulls over love's stages in his ubiquitous red-speckled notebooks. Petie becomes a fisherman and takes "pains to watch his brain take out trash." It's in his genes, after all. "Why attend this nonsense? Because his hope of mastering himself attracted him." IN the end, everybody calms down a little. When Lou and Toby find their way back to each other under extraordinary circumstances, it is entirely believable because by now we know these people intimately; we have plotted their phases along with them. In their old bed, "if passion returned they burst out laughing"; they take typically inordinate pleasure in their young grandson, Manny. Suddenly Toby doesn't care if his work will last; he has given up on acquiring Keats's "knowledge enormous." Ultimately, their story wins out and there is not the faintest sound of a wheel squeaking. In two beautifully told death scenes, Dillard has managed to achieve what Chekhov did with death in "The Bishop." He "takes the mystery out of dying, makes it almost an ordinary occurrence," Foote wrote to Percy. "And in the course of doing it, makes dying more of a mystery than ever." Now, after a lifetime of probing, pontificating, huffing and puffing, Dillard has accomplished the reader's payoff she so relentlessly detailed almost 20 years ago in "The Writing Life." She too has pressed upon us "the deepest mysteries." Julia Reed is contributing editor at Vogue and the author of "Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena." Her new book, "The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story," will be published next year.
Kirkus Review
An anthropologist's eye and a poet's precision distinguish this superbly written novel, exploring the ritual complexities of life, love and death. In only her second novel (after The Living, 1992), the Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist/memoirist (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974, etc.) provides a portrait of a relationship as it weathers the decades and endures twists and turns both unexpected and common. In almost fairy-tale fashion, Dillard details the romance in Cape Cod's Provincetown between Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree, who seem fated to fall in love. She's beautiful, though as Toby and the reader learn, she's so much more. He's a few years older, an aspiring poet, and initially tongue-tied and dumbstruck around Lou. They marry and have a son whom they both adore. Life is perfect--perhaps too perfect. Maybe people who idealize each other to such an extent can't know each other too well. Not only do Toby and Lou surprise themselves, they surprise their tightly knit community, whose quirky characters are themselves full of surprises. Little goes as Toby and Lou had planned when they were younger and enraptured. Twenty years after one of them betrays the other and moves to Maine, they ultimately reunite, on an even deeper level than what they had earlier known. With a penchant for alliteration and a refusal to pass moral judgments, Dillard renders her characters as flawed humans trying to make sense of the lives they are living but cannot understand. In the process, she examines the essence of beauty and the nature of death, the fate that all her characters face and the common denominator that perhaps defines each of them. The compact, elliptical narrative will continue to pervade the reader's consciousness long after the novel ends. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Home in Provincetown after the war, radical poet Toby Maytree and his more self-contained wife lean on friend Deary when their son is born. But then Deary helps to fragment their marriage. Reading group guide. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Maytrees A Novel Chapter One It began when Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree first met. He was back home in Provincetown after the war. Maytree first saw her on a bicycle. A red scarf, white shirt, skin clean as eggshell, wide eyes and mouth, shorts. She stopped and leaned on a leg to talk to someone on the street. She laughed, and her loveliness caught his breath. He thought he recognized her flexible figure. Because everyone shows up in Provincetown sooner or later, he had taken her at first for Ingrid Bergman until his friend Cornelius straightened him out. He introduced himself. --You're Lou Bigelow, aren't you? She nodded. They shook hands and hers felt hot under sand like a sugar doughnut. Under her high brows she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls' schools, he recalled later. Those girls looked straight at you. Her wide eyes, apertures opening, seemed preposterously to tell him, I and these my arms are for you. I know, he thought back at the stranger, this long-limbed girl. I know and I am right with you. He felt himself blush and knew his freckles looked green. She was young and broad of mouth and eye and jaw, fresh, solid and airy, as if light rays worked her instead of muscles. Oh, how a poet is a sap; he knew it. He managed to hold his eyes on her. Her rich hair parted on the side; she was not necessarily beautiful, or yes she was, her skin's luster. Her pupils were rifle bores shooting what? When he got home he could not find his place in Helen Keller. He courted Lou carefully in town, to wait, surprised, until his newly serious intent and hope firmed or fled, and until then, lest he injure her trust. No beach walks, dune picnics, rowing, sailing. Her silence made her complicit, innocent as beasts, oracular. Agitated, he saw no agitation in her even gaze. Her size and whole-faced smile maddened him, her round arms at her sides, stiff straw hat. Her bare shoulders radiated a smell of sun-hot skin. Her gait was free and light. Over her open eyes showed two widths of blue lids whose size and hue she would never see. Her face's skin was transparent, lighted and clear like sky. She barely said a word. She tongue-tied him. She already knew his dune-shack friend Cornelius Blue, knew the professors Hiram and Elaine Cairo from New York, knew everyone's friend Deary the hoyden who lived on the pier or loose in the dunes, and old Reevadare Weaver who gave parties. Bumping through a painter's opening, picking up paint at the hardware store, ransacking the library, she glanced at him, her mouth curving broadly, as if they shared a joke. He knew the glance of old. It was a summons he never refused. The joke was--he hoped--that the woman had already yielded but would set him jumping through hoops anyway. Lou Bigelow's candid glance, however, contained neither answer nor question, only a spreading pleasure, like Blake's infant joy, kicking the gong around. Maytree concealed his courtship. On the Cairos' crowded porch, she steadied her highball on the rail. He asked her, Would she like to row around the harbor with him? She turned and gave him a look, Hold on, Buster. He was likely competing with fleets and battalions of men. Maytree wanted her heart. She had his heart and did not know it. She shook her head, clear of eye, and smiled. If he were only a painter: her avid expression, mouth in repose or laughing, her gleaming concentration. The wide-open skin between her brows made their arcs long. Not even Ingrid Bergman had these brows. The first few times he heard her speak, her Britishy curled vowels surprised him. He rarely dared look her way. One day he might accompany Lou Bigelow from town out here to his family's old dune shack. He was afraid his saying "shack" would scare them both. Without her he already felt like one of two pieces of electrical tape pulled apart. He could not risk a mistake. Robert Louis Stevenson, he read in his Letters , called marriage "a sort of friendship recognized by the police." Charmed, Maytree bought a red-speckled notebook to dedicate to this vexed sphere--not to marriage, but to love. More red-speckled notebooks expanded, without clarifying, this theme. Sextus Propertius, of love: "Shun this hell." From some book he copied: "How does it happen that a never-absent picture has in it the power to make a fresh, overwhelming appearance every hour, wide-eyed, white-toothed, terrible as an army with banners?" She was outside his reach. Of course she glared at Maytree that fall when he came by barefoot at daybreak and asked if she would like to see his dune shack. Behind his head, color spread up sky. In the act of diving, Orion, rigid, shoulder-first like a man falling, began to dissolve. Then even the zenith and western stars paled and gulls squawked. Her house was on the bay in town. He proposed to walk her to the ocean--not far, but otherworldly in the dunes. She had been enjoying Bleak House . Men always chased her and she always glared. She most certainly did not ask him in. His was a startling figure: his Mars-colored hair, his height and tension, his creased face. He looked like a traveling minstrel, a red-eyed night heron. His feet were long and thin like the rest of him. He wore a billed fishing cap. An army canteen hung from his belt. She had been a schoolgirl in Marblehead, Massachusetts, when he went West. --Just a walk, he said, sunrise. We won't need to go inside. In his unsure smile she saw his good faith. Well, that was considerate, brickish of him, to say that they would not go in. She agreed. She had not seen the dunes in weeks. Maytree suggested she bring, as he did, a pair of socks, to provide webbed feet, and wear a brimmed hat that tied. In predawn light she saw the sunspokes around his eyes under his cap. The Maytrees A Novel . Copyright © by Annie Dillard. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Maytrees by Annie Dillard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
