THE MAYTREES

THE MAYTREES
By Annie Dillard
HarperCollins, 2007

Annie Dillard has earned a place on a list of America’s greatest authors, and her newest book certainly adds to a rich resume.

The book is a novel, set in Provincetown on Cape Cod, telling the stories of one man and one woman who fall in love (the Maytrees, Toby and Lou, hence the title). Like all of Dillard’s body of work, this one is rich with the flavor and language of the local geography (Dillard now lives on Cape Cod after once living in the Northwest and before that, Virginia). The novel starts just after World War Two, and ends perhaps just before the turn of our century.

In The Maytrees, Dillard resumes her theme of life and death. Her first book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, earned a Pulitzer Prize. It studied the nature of life and death from a non-fiction perspective. Her lengthy novel, The Living, set in the northwest, studied life and death over the course of generations in a community. Dillard’s newest novel studies life and death from the perspective of one couple who live both figuratively and literally beneath the stars on Cape Cod. But Dillard adds a wrinkle to this particular study. Toby Maytree is a poet whose work is an effort to define love. Thus, life and death are shaped by love.

There are three spectacular twists to the love affair of Toby and Lou, and I shall not spoil the book by naming them. Each one comes as a surprise to the reader. They are provocative, and the reader will perhaps find herself muttering, “No.” Whatever the response, the twists work a strong impression on the reader and mark Dillard as a genius not only of words but of plot.

This particular work is perhaps Dillard’s sparsest use of words. The language is almost poetic, for the sparseness combines with a very vivid selection of words:

“Yankee the turtle crawled out from under the couch and stretched his snake neck. He stood square as a pack mule waiting its load, like the lowest totem-pole animal resigned to shouldering all the rest, or resigned to lifting the seas that floated the lands, if this was that kind of world. He regarded dead Dreary with the obsidian calm of a god.” (p. 181)

Some readers may find it odd and unsettling, others will eat it up. Go ahead and chew, it tastes good!

George R. Pasley