The Maytrees

Summary (from the publisher): 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.

Review: I felt misled by this novel's title while reading this because both the title and the summary led me to believe the Maytrees would be a solid and loyal couple. But after reading this I see that the title refers to a more expansive definition of who the Maytrees are. The Maytrees are Toby and Lou who fall in love and keep on loving for fourteen years. But the Maytrees are also their son Petie, and friend and lover, Dearie.  This novel spans the decades from the beginning of Toby and Lou's love story to the end of their lives. 

However, at times it seemed like more than anything, this novel was about Annie Dillard showing what Annie Dillard can do. The language of this novel is lyrical more than it is prose-like. Many lines are beautiful: "After their first year or so, Lou's beauty no longer surprised him. He never stopped looking, because her face was his eyes' home" (45). Yet at other times, it seems as if Dillard prizes lyrical language even when it does not move the narrative forward. "She shipwrecked on the sheets. She surfaced like a dynamited bass. She opened her eyes and discovered where on their bed she had fetched up. She lay spread as a film and as fragile. Linked lights wavered on the wall. The linked lights looked like chain mail. They moved blindly over the wall's thumbtacked Klee print of Sinbad. The tide rising on sand outside bore these linked lights as if on a platter." (31). Although this novel is described as containing "spare" prose, it seems occasionally verbose in flowery language and spare in plot detail.

Dillard urges her characters on to old age and decrepitude from the very first line: "The Maytrees were young long ago" (1). Dillard is hard on her characters. They struggle to breathe and their hands turn blue and their hearts fail. They break bones and lose their independence. They stoop and resort to dragging themselves around or having someone carry them. "The last anyone saw Lou alive, thirty-nine years later, she was doubled over, walking with two canes up the steep dune to the shack. Her canes' tips she had fitted into rubber plungers to spread them on sand" (80). Interspersing the narrative with images of her characters later in life gives a non-linear feel to the narrative, emphasizing the circular, unending connections between the characters. It gives precedence to relationships and not time or distance. This is echoed in Dillard's beautiful description of motherhood in Lou's love for her son Petie, "Every one of those Peties and Petes was gone. That is who she missed, those boys now overwritten. Their replacement now sat at the green table wiping crumbs onto his plate. [...] How she wished she could see all those displaced Petes and Peties once more! She imagined joining picnic tables outside by the beach and setting them for 22 Peties and Petes, or 122, or however greedy she was that day and however divisible Pete. Together the sons at every age and size - scented with diaper, formula on rubber nipples, salt-soaked sand, bike grease, wax crayon, beer, manila, engine, oil, fish - waited for dinner" (108-109). 

Part of my problem with this novel is that it's a nice story, a nice poetical story, but I'm not sure how it works in reality. Why is Lou and Toby's marriage such a silent one? And how did they support themselves on their half-hearted part-time jobs? And how in the world does Dearie go from a friendly vagrant to becoming a high society lady? Even if Lou can forgive Toby, how can she forgive Dearie? And why doesn't Dearie at least act like she feels guilty?

In the end, whatever else has happened, the Maytrees love one another. "They loved and read good novels, good poetry. Had he stopped loving Lou? Not at all. His abiding heart-to-heart with her merely got outshouted" (100). So does that mean love means forgiving anything? Does it mean living alone for decades, apart from those you love? The Maytrees love seems like a very tragic, if very unending thing.

Stars: 3