Maytrees

The trajectory of wedded love is Annie Dillard's subject in this her second novel. The mesh of pointillistic sentences through which Dillard sifts her protagonists (Lou and Toby) allows the merely apparent truths in their lives to fall away, to be succeeded by illusions finer, more poignant perhaps, but no more durable. The dunes at Provincetown and the tides of the north Atlantic provide governing metaphors for the persistence and ever-altering equilibrium of love that defies the odds. Change is all for Dillard's couple, but against change a "radiant gist" of feeling endures.

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.

“A gorgeous meditation on one couple’s slog through marriage, separation and reconciliation.”

Annie Dillard has written eleven books, including the memoir of her parents, An American Childhood; the Northwest pioneer epic The Living; and the nonfiction narrative Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. A gregarious recluse, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Distributor: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication Date: 06-10-2008
Pages: 240
Measurements: 8in X 5.3125in X 0.540541in X 6.88oz