fine family redemption drama

books:


	• The Maytrees: A Novel Annie Dillard HarperCollins, 2007 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 47 reviews view larger image
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Almost Poetic

Written in stark, almost poetic prose, not a word wasted, not an adjective used if not necessary, not a single flight into fancy, this strange little book mirrors its two main characters, stoic New Englanders who meet, marry, have a great love affair, and go through the decades in different, often shockingly surprising, iterations.

I won't do a spoiler here, although really the book is much less plot-oriented than it is a visual piece, carefully placed before the reader with exquisitely thought-out verbal images. It's hard to describe more accurately than that.

I would hate to put a prosaic theme on it, but the idea that love outlives everything and changes and grows with the people who feel it, while ridiculously cliched when one tries to put it in a review, is exactly what this book is ultimately about.

Not for everyone, but I so admired the exquisite use of the language, I give it a five, and highly recommend it. Just expect an almost excrutiatly slow pace--and enjoy each word.

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fine family redemption drama

Just after WW II ends in Provincetown on Cape Cod, wannabe thirtyish poet Toby Maytree and college student Lou Bigelow meet. Though an author, Toby struggles to get his tongue straight as he is unable to put together two coherent thoughts let alone sentences. Still she senses something deep inside his soul; they relish the dunes, fall in love and marry. A few years later they add a son Pete to their perfect family.

However, their idyllic life together ends when a cheating Toby leaves his wife and son to go be with his lover in Maine. Two decades later, a tragedy brings Toby and Lou together for the first time since he left his family behind. They poorly coped with his desertion. Feelings between the pair remains strong, but love proved weak the first time around.

The key to this fine family redemption drama is Annie Dillard avoids values pointing in order to make a "guilty" verdict re her flawed characters; instead she leaves that to readers to decide who failed at relationships and why. No action, this is a purely character driven tale of paradise lost and paradise regained maybe; as a wiser Toby, Lou and Pete finally understand life is a journey to death.

Harriet Klausner

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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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