The Maytrees

I’ve never been a big Annie Dillard fan. Years ago, I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm. The writing seemed constantly to distract from what was being said to how it was being said, from content to style: “Look at me! I’m a great turn of phrase! I’m inventive and poetic!”

But I’ve never read either of her novels. Now, over a decade after my first acquaintance with this author, this title came up at book club, and when I saw it at the library this week I decided to give The Maytrees a try. At the least, I’d be preparing for a possible future book club read; at the most, I’d come away thinking differently of Annie Dillard.

I’m still not what you’d call a fan. But despite that, I found myself drawn into this tale, which focuses on the 40-year ebb and flow of the relationship between Lou and Toby Maytree, two members of Cape Cod’s Provincetown artistic community who meet meet shortly after World War II.

Not much happens. The Maytrees are at least partly autobiographically drawn; Toby is a poet, and both he and his sometime wife Lou contemplate nature and philosophy. The central question the novel takes up is the nature of love. It’s tested in the crucible of unfaithfulness, Toby following the pattern of quest and discovery, Lou of nesting as she burrows deep in one place.

I came to develop a great respect and liking for silent and still Lou, whom Toby leaves for her flashier and flirtier friend, and to whom he ultimately returns in a twist of plot just incredible enough to be plausible. How could I not like this woman who, in the years after her husband leaves,

had reclaimed what she had forfeited of her own mind, if any. She took pains to keep outside the world’s acceleration. An Athens marketplace amazed Diogenes with ‘How many things there are in the world of which Diogenes hath no need!’ Lou had long since cut out fashion and all radio but the Red Sox. In the past few years she had let go her ties to people she did not like, to ironing, to dining out in town, and buying things not necessary and that themselves needed care. She ignored whatever did not interest her. With those blows she opened her days like a pinata. A hundred freedoms fell on her. She hitched free years to her lifespan like a kite tail. Everyone envied her the time she had, not noticing that they had equal time.

Having resolved to love and forgive rather than harden into bitterness, and having performed the long and deliberate labor of following through on her choice, she avoids the equally tempting pitfall of becoming militantly independent. When Maytree returns years later with a need that calls for astonishing self-giving, Lou is up for the challenge:

She bade her solitude good-bye. Good-bye no schedule but whim; good-bye her life among no things but her own and each always in place; good-bye no real meals, good-bye free thought. The whole fat flock of them flapped away. But what was solitude for if not to foster decency? Her solitude always held open house. When was the last time someone needed her? She was eager to do it, whatever it was.

How could I fail to be inspired? I close the book with the scales tipped toward a surprised liking for this experience with Dillard. I’d read probably half of the book before it began to win me over, not because of the style so often praised for its flash and novelty, but because in spite of it the meaning with its slower burn melted through and glowed. “Redemptive” is a word we sometimes overuse to describe any story about someone who rises to a challenge. Here is a tale that does full justice to it. Like the hawthorne, the symbolically rich tree after whom the Maytrees are named, this novel testifies to the toughness, beauty, and complex possibilities of the heart.