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2024-04-26 4:20 am

The Maytrees: A Novel

by Annie Dillard

Hardcover, 2007

Call number

FIC DIL

Collection

Genres

General Fiction

Publication

Harper (2007), Edition: 1, 216 pages

Description

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. 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. Lou takes up painting. When their son Pete appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. These people are all loving, and ironic. As Dillard intimately depicts nature's vastness and nearness, she presents willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love.--From publisher description.… (more)

Subjects

Domestic fiction

Friendship Fiction

Provincetown (Mass.) Fiction

Media reviews

Annie Dillard has always been at her best when considering death; the contemplation of mortality gives her writing an extraordinarily fierce and burnished quality. Her central, crucial question remains that posed in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: "What was it, exactly - or even roughly - that we people

are meant to be doing here? Or, how best to use one's short time?"

— 7 more

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.”

Los Angeles Times

You have to be wise to write in this kind of shorthand. You have to know something about what words can and cannot do. "Love so sprang at her," she writes of Lou, "she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not

have recognized it. Time to read everything again." It takes depth and width of experience to write lean and still drag your readers under the surface of their own awareness to that place where it's all vaguely familiar and, yes, universal.

Washington Post

Annie Dillard's books are like comets, like celestial events that remind us that the reality we inhabit is itself a celestial event, the business of eons and galaxies, however persistently we mistake its local manifestations for mere dust, mere sea, mere self, mere thought. The beauty and obsession

of her work are always the integration of being, at the grandest scales of our knowledge of it, with the intimate and momentary sense of life lived. The Maytrees is about wonder -- in the terms of this novel, life's one truth. It is wonder indeed that is invoked here, vast and elusive and inexhaustible and intimate and timeless. There is a resolute this-worldliness that startles the reader again and again with recognition. How much we overlook! What a world this is, after all, and how profound on its own terms.

Books and Culture

For Dillard, a sense of exile seems always to accompany intimations of the holy, leaving her to ask, in many different ways, how time can be redeemed or restored, how the broken can be made whole.

Open Letters Monthly

The Maytrees, Dillard’s second attempt at the form, is composed of equal parts human detail, sweeping landscape, and commonplace book musings on the role of love in life. It sounds like a good combination—and the book has some fine moments—but she doesn’t cook her ingredients.

At times, "The Maytrees" acts like vintage Dillard: It contains gorgeous, meticulous descriptions of the outdoors that springboard into the Platonic ether, into meditations on devotion, loss, and time. But the book does not reach as far into the clouds, or linger there as long, as Dillard's earlier

work did. Her philosophical impulses are present, but they are moored to a linear narrative, and made to spring more or less logically from the minds and actions of flesh-and-blood characters. The result is one of the most lucid and effective books Dillard has ever produced.

Now in “The Maytrees,” her second novel and a shimmering meditation on the ebb and flow of love, Ms. Dillard has created the sort of narrative that will have acolytes moaning low.

User reviews

LibraryThing member skiegazer3

I suspect this is a book that is best appreciated if it's approached not as a novel, really, but as a book-length poem (like the kind the protagonist, Maytree, writes throughout his life). Reading with this kind of attitude allows for a bit more patience, appreciation of Dillard's unique voice

(which has a certain music once you get used to it), and freedom from the usual narrative structure of most novels. I admit, I had to go back and read the first chapter twice before I could even move on to the rest of the book. But after a while, I looked forward to sitting down each night and reading a chapter or two before bed, so that by the end, I found myself wishing the book was longer. Luckily, it's the kind of book you can come back to again and again, because there's so much more in it than mere plot.

LibraryThing member BookConcierge

I found the style off-putting and it was just torture to read. I cared nothing about the characters and did not relate to any of them. I finished it only because it was a book club selection. There are a few memorable passages that show the author has talent (and earned her 1 star). But in general,

I did notlike this book and do not recommend it.

LibraryThing member CassieLM

The language is this book is really lovely. It's poetic, it's beautiful. I'm writing this review several months after finishing the book. I don't really remember much about the characters. I have some recollections of the plot. Those elements are not impressive. It's possible that this is a case of

style over substance; pretty words that don't say much. But the words are very pretty.

LibraryThing member THEPRINCESS

I received a recommendation on this from my aunt and we usually like the same kind of books, but I had a real problem with this one. After around page 100 I told her I was going to quit reading but she begged me to continue saying I wouldn't be sorry. But I am sorry. I could have been reading

something really interesting. I just couldn't care what happened with Lou or Toby much less what Lou decides to do later in their lives. And the writing made me think of a poet "wanna be". Too much symbolism in a wavering format. Many times I had to re-read lines to try to figure out what was meant buy certain phrases.Some just didn't connect at all. Just too much work for what it was worth. Maybe it was written for loftier readers.

LibraryThing member phyllis.shepherd

Widely well-reviewed, but I didn't like it. Non-linear style, with so many unfamiliar words as to seem pretentious. I did not finish it.

LibraryThing member msbaba

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard is a richly pleasing hybrid—a transcendent mix of a book-length lyrical poem, spare unsentimental love story, and philosophical treatise on the nature of endearing marital love. It is linguistically seductive and unabashedly challenging—a novel to be savored.

I

almost stopped reading because I was found myself repeatedly put off by Dillard’s use of exquisite rhythmic and lyrical metaphors that I could not understand. She also loves to use antiquated words that I should have looked up in a dictionary but chose not to. Perhaps with a second reading, added by a dictionary, some hidden imagery and meaning will reveal itself. But I continued reading because I soon found myself too engaged in the story and mesmerized by the abundant fresh imagery to stop.

Dillard clearly loves the English language and knows it better and deeper than most. She has a remarkable gift for using it in breathtaking and brazen new ways. I could feel my brain erupting with tiny explosions of glee every time new phrasing, sentence structure, and metaphors made their way from consciousness to imagery within my mind’s eye.

Throughout, the work depicts a deep love of place—in this case the tip of Cape Cod, the famous artist’s colony of Bohemian writers, musicians, painters, and poets. This is an unyielding, demanding landscape, awash in translucent light and natural beauty. The humans who thrive here—who love this landscape with all their being—are people who must accommodate themselves to its wild and harsh demands. This is the same message that Dillard has for us about the true nature of enduring marital love. It, too, makes wild and harsh demands. If we accommodate ourselves to our beloveds while still being fully true to ourselves, if we allow our beloveds to be fully true to themselves, if we accept our beloveds without judgment or blame, endearing love will follow.

This book is not for everyone. But if you enjoy an intellectual and literary challenge, and already possess mature experience about enduring love, this book will transport you and touch your soul.

LibraryThing member PattyAnn25

Reminds me of a long ago trip to Provincetown. Very different world from this one though. Excellent read.

LibraryThing member jaspezia

I enjoyed this gorgeously written story of Toby and Lou and their life in Cape Cod. Sounds so simple. Prose so rich.

LibraryThing member Gwendydd

A novel chronicling the life of a married couple from their courtship to their death. Throughout their marriage, they both grapple with trying to understand what love is, and what life is all about. Dillard's writing style is very pithy - she uses very short sentences, and occasionally a sentence

that seems totally unrelated to anything else. Because of this, I found her characters to be rather flat: I just never felt like I really understood any of them, and I couldn't understand their actions, much less their emotions. The writing is amazing, but I didn't enjoy the story or the characters.

LibraryThing member tangledthread

This is an atmospheric love story of Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree in Provincetown. Their story begins shortly after World War II and moves forward in time. He's a poet and she's a painter. Their orbits merge in a community with loose social boundaries on Cape Cod. After 14 years of marriage and a

child, there is a betrayal and 20 year separation. A reunion is brought about by failing health.

The writing is more prose than narrative. The landscape of a peninsula in water is thematic in the story. The story challenges the reader to ponder love, solitude, acceptance, and the boundaries that we humans establish for ourselves.

LibraryThing member LhLibrarian

This was a very lyrical book. It took a litle to get back into how Annie Dillard writes - but I really enjoyed it. There was another review that described her stories as written in poetry, that seems to be a very apt description.

LibraryThing member sharlene_w

I enjoyed the simple message that love can runs deeper than the betrayal and I appreciated the lyrical prose, but I mostly found the book to be rambling and disjointed. Either I wasn't intellectual enough to "get it" or it wasn't that good. I started over two or three times, trying to understand

the plot. I really couldn't say I was glad I read it when all was said and done because reading it was such a chore. I found myself wondering who recommended this to me because they have completely discredited themselves. Thank goodness for Library Thing as I was able to make note that is was from Good Morning America's Summer Read spotlight from Jane Magazine.

LibraryThing member MarianV

Annie Dillard is one of my favorite authors. I enjoy reading about nature & Dillard's prose can turn the barest fact into poetry. THE MAYTREES also reads like a poem. The subjects are the substance of poetry --the sea, the shore, the tides, the starry sky above & the mud-flat swamps below. The

problem with this novel is the story.
A man & woman fall in love. They have a child, which they love. The man is a poet, at least part-time. They live in a house by the sea, on Cape Cod, by Provincetown, one of this country's most artistic places. We are shown how they love, each other & the beauty of the sea & shore. What we are not shown is how they are able to hurt each other & disrupt the life of their child. I had no sense at all as to why these people acted as they did, only that the man, the poet, was some how above the moral standards of everyone else. And his lady friend who was "Bohemian" in her antics was also excused. And the wife who bears the cost of this mis-adventure? She sails serenely along, we are never shown nor told any emotional reactions on onybodys part.
Annie Dillard wrote another novel "The Living" which I tried to read, but had to stop reading because everytime I began to fell close to a character, they died. In this novel, the characters live long lives, but we never feel close to them at all. The writing, however, is beautiful -- very poetic.

LibraryThing member Michaenite

Wonderful use of language to illustrate subjective relationship of the individual to nature, self and love of others.

LibraryThing member mojomomma

I really disliked this. I didn't like the plot line and I didn't think I was smart enough to read Dillard's prose, which is actually poetry. I'm not one to wade through symbolism, just lay out the story already! Most of her efforts were wasted on me, I'm afraid.

LibraryThing member Mooose

Not an easy book for me to read as I was wondering what the author wanted me to get out of it. Never became swept away into the language although the location was pulling me to the sea. After I finished I was thinking about it and decided she was writing about love, not your typical love story. Not

an easy book to read or understand but full of lovely language and set in a beautiful place.

LibraryThing member stonelaura

With descriptions such as "a clumsy beach" and "a greasy sky," Annie Dillard's "The Maytrees" is nothing if not poetic. This book is perhaps best described as the concept of a book; rather than a detailed rendering it is an impressionistic portrayal. In beautifully poetic language Dillard gives us

glimpses into the lives and thoughts of a love triangle as Toby Maytree first marries quiet and reserved Lou Bigelow and then, after fourteen years of seemingly happy marriage, later moves to Maine with dynamic and colorful Deary. But the plot is the fuzzy background; foremost are the lush descriptions and bemusing dollops of insight that, swirling around the characters and the setting, make for a full and poignant story of love, loss and forgiveness.

LibraryThing member DonnaB317

Quite beautiful. The book is a poem, really. The images were beautiful and painful at the same time. I was sad when it ended.

LibraryThing member marient

Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, and educated poet of thirty. He courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him.
In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces

the Maytrees; decades of loving and longing.

LibraryThing member DSeanW

Lyrical and enjoyable but her nonfiction works sets the bar way to high.

LibraryThing member gouldc

beautiful book about relationship and about growth and inevitable difficulties. Intensely looks at inner life.

LibraryThing member satyridae

I approached this book warily, as it's fiction, and I've always thought that Dillard was best at essays and inquiries into the natural world. I was prepared to be disappointed, but I was not prepared to be, as I was, blown away. This book is an astonishing, lambent, transcendent meditation on love,

marriage and humanity. The story of Toby and Lou Maytree, and their friends and families, works on many different levels. The book is like a photo fussed over in Photoshop- layer after translucent layer, each coloring the whole delicately and almost imperceptibly. Every word drops into place with a feeling of inevitability, so well crafted is this novel. Highly recommended.

LibraryThing member LDVoorberg

I picked out this audio book completely at random, having never even heard of [author:Annie Dillard] before. (shame on me!) But what an excellent, poetic and thought-provoking exploration on what love is and what it means to live and love. Excellently written, too.

The beginning of the novel is a

bit slow and descriptive, but stick with it! The story and characters will capture your attention.

This novel would make an excellent study for literature students, book clubs, and those reflecting on what it means to love, be in love, and live with love.

LibraryThing member lonepalm

Arcane at best: Not having encountered this author previously, perhaps it was inevitable that there would be a learning curve, but the gradient surpassed anything expected. The author seems to be the master of the terse, difficult to comprehend word, phrase, sentence, etc. Characters are no more

than a few fuzzy brush strokes. Scenarios, places, and plot are sketches and fragments at best. For what it's worth, the author admits to cutting her original page count from 1400 to the very generous count of just over 200 small pages. Perhaps prosaic readability went on the chopping block.

To those unfamiliar with this author, break out the dictionaries and other reference materials and be prepared to expend much effort in supplying meaning and context. To fans and highbrow reviewers, a tip of the hat to you who obviously have great powers of perception, if not tolerance.

LibraryThing member gregorybrown

Beautiful. Annie Dillard writes like no one else I know, except for maybe Marilynne Robinson. Her only weakness is that she only knows how to write one type of character (and the internal monologue of one type of character). :(

Awards

Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 2009)

PEN/Faulkner Award (Finalist — 2008)

Booklist Editor's Choice: Adult Books (Fiction — 2007)

The New York Times Notable Books of the Year (Fiction & Poetry — 2007)

Christian Science Monitor Best Book (Fiction — 2007)

Historical Novel Society Editors' Choice (Literary)

Pages

216

ISBN

0061239534 / 9780061239533

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