The Maytrees: A Novel | 
| Author: Annie Dillard
Publisher: HarperCollins
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  52 reviews
Sales Rank: 873698
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Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.1 x 1.1
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
ASIN: B001AQS014
Publication Date: June 1, 2007
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Product 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. 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. Lou takes up painting. 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 nature's vastness and nearness. She presents willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Annie Dillard's original body of work.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 47 more reviews...
 Good writing, bad narrative October 4, 2008
Dillard's philosphical musings on nature's savage beauty worked wonders in classics like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. A novel, however, requires more weight than good writing. A novel needs meaning, plot development, and resolution. The Maytrees begin their life together as shining examples of pure love. Their relationship quickly devolves, and though Dillard tries to make amends, the reader is never vindicated--love does not triumph. Her characters bend too easily in the face of tragedy. Toby and Lou Maytree become examples only of acquiescence. The romantic reader will be greatly dissapointed.
 Is is possible to have a love/hate relationship with a book? September 11, 2008
The Maytrees tends to read much more like one of the epic poems Dillard's character, Maytree, wrote about in this novel than any typical piece of fiction. The characters are rather flat but it is the "idea" of them that is magnetic. The storyline is fascinating, if only for the fact that we challenge ourselves to think about our own right or wrong reactions to the instances at hand. That said, it is probably one of the most pretentious pieces of fiction I've read in a long time. You really have to be born and raised in Cape Cod (or have the patience to research every nuance) in order to get total satisfaction from the book.
 Jellyfish August 21, 2008
I'll make this very short; don't think this book merits more attention. As you can tell from the lack of stars awared I did not care for it. Maytree, the husband, appears rather spineless, easily led; not a very sympathetic character.
A Poetic Essay on Love July 18, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I have long considered Annie Dillard as one of the finest American essayists, right up there with E. B. White. Her description in TEACHING A STONE TO TALK of watching a total eclipse of the sun on a hilltop in Washington State is one of the most remarkable short pieces of writing I can think of, for its combination of everyday detail, scientific observation, and sheer awe at the smallness of man in the transcendental scale of the cosmos. Dillard's poetry, her awareness of the totality of the natural world, also shines through almost every page of her novel, THE MAYTREES, about the long marriage of a couple in Provincetown, Cape Cod. As an extreme example, take this almost baroque incantation to the stars: "They were Arabic: Enif, Markab, Achernar, Hamal, Alfirk, Scheat, Rasalhague. They moved evenly over the black desert. They spread and kept their places as searchers sweep a field. Algenib and Denebola had gone before. Fomalhaut kept alone. Alpheratz and Saiph trailed out of sight."
Contrast this, from near the beginning of the book, when Lou Bigelow takes her first walk in the sand dunes with her future husband, Toby Maytree: "From the high dune Maytree was trying to show her his shack on the horizon. Where could he mean? Would he touch her shoulder with his hand, or even arm, as he pointed? She had not let a man this close in years. Against blue sea she saw sand crests trace catenary curves against sky. Knee-high pines marked some hollows." Simple, simple writing, with just that one word "catenary," astounding in its precision, articulating the skilful balance of the sentence on which it rides, energizing the entire passage. Dillard's subject is love. She occasionally describes it in sentimental terms, more often in an objective mode as though marriage were merely another subject for natural history, and most frequently (as in the dunes passage above) by a kind of poetic analogy between the inner and outer worlds. So long as this works, the book is a marvel, but I don't feel that it is enough to sustain the needs of a novel.
Besides being a carpenter, Maytree is a poet. Every few years, he publishes book-length poems, but regrets that the only things of his to get wider attention are shorter pieces that have nothing of the scope of his bolder concepts. But I suspect that his gift, like Annie Dillard's, may have been more lyrical than epic. Open this book almost at random, and you will find magnificent writing. But despite the author's attempt to give it a bold arch spanning many decades, buttressed at the one end by courtship and at the other by death, the structure loses integrity in the middle. Dillard is quite skilful in her use of brief forward leaps in time to set up deceptive expectations, so I should not give away those aspects of the plot that are a surprise. But suffice it to say that when something truly unexpected does happen, it seems both unprepared and inexplicable. For a while, the burden of the story falls more on the shoulders of more minor characters who have not been established with the depth and sympathy of the Maytrees themselves. And when the novel moves back towards emotional resolution, everything seems to happen too easily. Yes, it is beautiful, but the lives involved lack some of the harsher edges, the pain, grit, and texture needed to validate beauty. Dillard's magnificent poetry needs to be balanced with more plain old prose.
 Deeply Beautiful July 6, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
It's very hard to describe The Maytrees in a few sentences. What is this novel about? I suppose it is, as many others have said, a love story. But to my mind it is as much about love of place as it is about love of a spouse or of a family.
There's not much action in the conventional sense, so if you are looking for a good plot, I would skip this book. What it is, though, is incredibly, deeply lyrical. The language sings and whispers, and occasionally shouts. Reading The Maytrees is like reading a poem masquerading as a novel.
I am a lover of Provincetown, located at the end of Cape Cod and the setting for this story. Annie Dillard has clearly done her research on the town's history and deftly evokes the way Provincetown life has changed over the years. Right after WW II, when the story begins, the town is isolated and quaint, where, as Dillard writes, people walk about by starlight and live in rhythm with the seasons. By book's end, the town has become a "resort destination," where the primary business is real estate rather than fishing.
Dillard's characters carry on lives separated between the dunes along the Atlantic and the town on the sheltered bay. In summer, many of the principal characters live lives of solo contemplation in shacks out on the dunes -- writing, painting or just watching the tides. In winter, they come back to town to live through the cold months in houses clustered along Cape Cod Bay, but never are they far from the sea.
There is a very thin line between indoors and outdoors. In summer Deary Hightoe rolls herself into a mainsail and sleeps along the swale deep in the dunes. At 80, Lou Maytree continues to live in her dune shack through December, watching storms roll in from the Atlantic and stuffing the shack's chinks with steel wool to keep out mice. These and a thousand other small things -- for instance, finding one's way through the dunes at night by walking barefoot, toes feeling for the various types of sand -- create a strong sense of place, as well as a sense of the abiding love that these characters feel for a place where land, sea and sky meet, merge, blend, move apart, and then come back together again.
This meeting of sky, land and sea is much like the meeting, advancing, parting and reuniting of the novel's main characters. I don't know if I am reading too much symbolism into The Maytrees or not. Perhaps Dillard intends for each of her readers to inject themselves and their own loves into the story, or perhaps it is merely the way I chose to read her book. In any case, the characters and their stories have stayed with me and I expect that I will come back to The Maytrees again at some point in the future, something I rarely do.
For me, this novel is five stars all the way.
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