The Maytrees

by Annie Dillard

Book Overview

"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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061239534
• ISBN13: 9780061239533
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Novel as Poetry

This astonishingly poetic novel is one I hope to read over and over again and am considering forming a book group just to read it with other people (and then promptly disband the group because what could you possibly read after this?). I think it helps to be familiar with the cultures and landscapes of Provincetown and Camden because they are sketched lightly and esoterically here - this book outlines the emotional landscapes of these these New Englanders, and it is fittingly spare and exasperating even as it enchants and imparts its own poetic wisdom. There are moments when people are obtuse and unsympathetic, and having choked too often on romaticized renderings of native Cape Codders I find it enthralling, at last, to see revealed the plain spoken yet complex thoughts of those given to few words. And there is, of course, the arc of the marriage and the midlife retooling of the main characters. Ms. Dillard's characters open windows to marriage, love, motherhood, death, materialsm and self that were long painted shut. How you find this book - believable or sympathetic or noble or startling - says a lot about what you expect from your reading experience. I began by expecting something much more straightforward (I had just finished On Chesil Beach, which is also wonderful in its way, but more direct in its telling) and instead found poetry and wisdom that will take me through the rest of my life.

Salivate over Dillard's Wisdom, Compassion, Storytelling Talent, Forgiveness, Ruthlessness, and Abid

Dillard is one of, if not perhaps the greatest, living poet and writer. Her books ebb and flow with the gorgeosity of existence, an exaltation and a high-five to being alive. This story is compelling; its simplicity tugs at your heart, while its understated orginiality leaves you breathless. How is Dillard capable of this, of squeezing such wisdom and beauty from a time and a place and a family? She SHOWS you, in so many words, lifetimes in a page. I came to understand myself in a more compassionate and loving way while reading this novel. I can't say that about many books- perhaps only this one.

Offering a tantalizing glimpse at the truth of how the ties between women and men are forged and tes

In 1973, Sweden's Ingmar Bergman directed a film titled Scenes from a Marriage, chronicling the stages of a relationship that culminates in the divorce and eventual reconciliation of the protagonists. That title could have served equally well to describe Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's affecting second novel, THE MAYTREES. The main action of THE MAYTREES takes place in and around Provincetown, the famous artistic community on the tip of Cape Cod. Although the novel's time span is not spelled out with precision, it encompasses roughly 40 years, beginning shortly after World War II, when Toby Maytree, an aspiring poet and handyman, meets Lou Bigelow, a woman he at first mistook for Ingrid Bergman, "because everyone shows up in Provincetown sooner or later." Soon, Toby and Lou are married and the parents of a son, Petie. To all outward appearances, their relationship is idyllic and the bonds that hold them together strong, until the day when Petie suffers a broken leg in a bicycle accident and Toby chooses that occasion to announce he's leaving Lou after 14 years of marriage to move to Maine with Deary Hightoe, a family friend and something of an eccentric who is fond of sleeping on the beach, swaddled in a canvas sail. Toby and Deary live contentedly in Maine for 20 years, while Lou and Petie (known as "Pete" as he becomes an adult and earns his living as a commercial fisherman) must come to terms with Toby's abandonment. Eventually, circumstances reunite the characters in Provincetown, and their relationships, in all their complexity, come full circle to bring about a tender and moving resolution. To some, Toby's abandonment of his wife and young son will appear inexplicable, but it serves as the underpinning for the intriguing questions Dillard raises in her novel. There's no simmering conflict that eventually detonates with the announcement of Toby's departure, no torrid affair with Deary that motivates him. Instead, Toby muses, he simply "fell in love, love unlooked-for." Dillard's theme is marital love: what causes that love to blossom and then endure over time, and why does it sometimes slip away despite the best intentions of both partners? "The feeling of love is so crucial to our species," she observes, "it is excessive, like labor pain. Lasting love is an act of will. It is a gentleman's game." As befits a writer best known for her nature writing in classics like PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK and HOLY THE FIRM, THE MAYTREES is laden with rich descriptive passages portraying the life of nature on Cape Cod. In some ways, THE MAYTREES is an extended lyric poem, filled with captivating imagery. Describing the winter sea, Dillard writes, "Sky ran its candid lengths round the hoop of the horizon. Weak swells spent themselves in muddy sea ice. A tide line of frozen froth like lees stranded in the dead rye." Or this: "From a white lake of fog opaque as paint, the tips of dunes, and only the tips of dunes, arose everywhere like sand

Dillard's Maytrees grow deeply in Love.

Quoting Thomas Hardy, "It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in" (p. 89). Whether it's her fiction (The Living), poetry (Tickets For A Prayer Wheel), or narrative nonfiction (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; For the Time Being), my life always stops for a new Annie Dillard (1945) book. Dillard describes The Maytrees as "a SHORT novel of lifelong love in marriage, set on Cape Cod among the Provincetown artists' colony people, starting in the 1940's" (http://www.anniedillard.com/). With her naturalist's eye for detail and her brilliant, poetic insights, Dillard tells the love story of Toby Maytree (a minor poet and handyman) and Lou Bigelow (a painter), who meet in bohemian, post-WWII Provincetown. While Lou seduces Toby with her beauty (think Ingrid Bergman), Toby seduces Lou with his poetry. As newlyweds, the Maytrees read hundreds of books together, cook soup, and then raise a son (Petie). Fourteen years later, Toby rejects monogamy and abruptly leaves his marriage to live in a beach shack with a free-spirited woman, Deary Hightoe, but he continues to correspond with Lou and Petie in letters Lou reads "with affectionate interest." "I will always love you," he tells Lou. "Believe me" (p. 65). Lou remains on the Cape and seeks comfort by reading the Russians and Thomas Hardy (who "always distracted her in rough patches, as when her father vamoosed," p. 89). Dillard's novel then takes an unimaginable turn (sure to spark reader debate) when--like a piece of broken driftwood--Toby returns to Lou twenty years later (the scene is reminiscient of Odysseus' return to Penelope after spending seven years in captivity on the goddess Calypso's distant island), seeking hospice care for dying Deary, transforming Dillard's already atypical love story into a lesson of Love's resilience. This perfect novel reveals Dillard at her transcendent best. G. Merritt

Annie Has A Way With Words--To Say The Least

It's a slim book about a four-letter word. Annie Dillard's new novel, a spare 224 pages, is essentially a love story. The Maytrees is about the marriage of Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree. Set in Provincetown, Cape Cod, they meet just after World War II. They fall in love and marry. Then life happens. A child is born. An accident occurrs. There is a betrayal. Time passes and people age. Then there is a time for returning home. That's the bare bones of the matter. Only, what matters more--as this story is told, more than merely what happens--is how these characters think about what happens. Theirs is a rich life of the mind, quietly reflecting on the choices they've made, and how to live with them. (Bones, however bare and broken, do figure into the story as well.) In other words, and not many words, this novel is more a telling of how these two individuals come to understand the nature and meaning of love within the context of their own unfolding and unconventional story. As Maytree himself works it out, "The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock." In The Maytress, love (What is it? How is it made? Can it be done?) is precisely the question. And it is the one question that asks so much of everyone, perhaps no one more than Lou herself. For Lou, who once could be mistaken for Ingrid Bergman, might well be mistaken later on for the classic patient and long-suffering wife, to say nothing of the prospect of canonization. But, she'd think nothing of the kind. What she ends up doing (and it's a stunner!) is something she thinks"anyone would" do. Perhaps we're are all potentially capable of such feats both sacred and mundane. I have my doubts. But I also wonder if the saints are not somehow or other aware of their sainthood from an early age? For, in her adolescence and after her father left her mother, abandoning the family altogether, Lou made a telling self-discovery. "Aware how keenly she would miss any who vanished, she never considered loving less. This odd idea stuck in her mind." Then later, of a college romance with "a reckless cellist," she decided that "she liked loving, renounced being loved, and only rarely thought of slitting his throat." Then there's that impertinent question. Really, it's a thinly disguised spin off of the one big question of love. It's the question that suddenly occurs to you when you are The Prodigal whatever. It hits you in the face exactly like the slamming of a screen door, just when it's too late and you're already on your way: Is it a good time to come home when you have to? Somehow or other, this fictional story rings true. At the very least, couldn't we all agree that true love should go beyond mere feelings and conventional morality? Perhaps the heart itself, instead of being