The Maytrees: A Novel

"Packed with superb writing." — New York Newsday “One of the most distinctive voices in American letters today.” — Boston Globe "In this amazing novel, Dillard has combined her Thoreau-like nature writing with her philisophical/theological way of looking at the world to create a beautiful story of life and love and ultimately death. . . . This is the kind of novel in which you want to linger over the beauty of each sentence and along with Dillard’s characters, contemplate topics like why we love or what are we meant to do with our lives. While the outer story seems so simple, the inner story is incredibly profound." — Cathy Schornstein “Dillard calls on her erudition as a naturalist and her grace as a poet to create an enthralling story of marriage—particular and universal, larky and monumental.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A superbly written novel. . . . The compact, elliptical narrative will continue to pervade the reader’s consciousness long after the novel ends.” — Kirkus (starred review) “A rhapsodic novel of our times. . . . In this mythic and transfixing tale, Dillard wryly questions notions of love, exalts in life’s metamorphoses, and celebrates goodness. She casts a spell sensuous and metaphysical.” — Booklist (starred review) “Annie Dillard is best known her for lyrical observations on nature and philosophy, and she puts those talents to marevelous use in her new novel The Maytrees, a love story that spans four decades and is set on Cape Cod….Dillard takes the most amazing facts and lays them bare for all to see.” — BookPage “Dillard, a naturalist at heart, poignantly tracks the relationships between Lou and Toby Maytree across 50 years.” — More Magazine “Glorious.” — The Miami Herald “In The Maytrees , Dillard creates a beautiful sense of stillness as she details the unencumbered lives of Toby and Lou.” — The Christian Science Monitor “Annie Dillard gets it right twice in her second novel. As well as being the compelling story of a couple who marry just after World War II, The Maytrees is an ode to the unique, open-skied beauty of Provincetown. . . . Writing about Provincetown, Annie Dillard does the near-impossible: She matches the simple splendor of language to the subtle magnificence of place. And writing about the Maytrees, she captures the entwining and transformation of two people who marry and then grow up.” — The New York Observer “Dillard has written an elegant metaphor strewn and at the same time beach-funky, philosophically minded, ocean-side love story set on Cape Cod, between the dunes and the star-splashed sky above.” — NPR's All Things Considered “Dillard’s erudition and her tendency to pose large philosophical and moral questions are in evidence here as in her other works. . . . The Maytrees is a fine book, both in depth of insight and freshness of language . . . by one of our finest contemporary authors.” — The Roanoke Times “Each paragraph of Dillard’s novel is a thing of beauty, meticulously crafted and vivid, whether expressing the loveliness of a seascape or a man’s inner turmoil.” — Entertainment Weekly “A gorgeous meditation on one couple’s slog through marriage, separation and reconciliation.” — The Washington Post “The Maytrees is a soulful exploration of love and marriage that has the hot, sunburned sting of a seaside summer afternoon. . . . Dillard evokes the rich landscape and characters of Cape Cod—its eccentric clam diggers and poets posing as roofers—while centering her story around one family’s moving tragedy.” — People “Dillard has all she needs in terms of imagination, and she is handy with the witty rejoinders.” — The Chicago Tribune “Lyrically enthralling. . . . Dillard tells an engaging, subtle tale.” — The Seattle Times “Dillard’s writing can be as fine as the constellations in a clear night sky.” — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “‘Full of grace’ describes both the story and the way Dillard tells it. Her style is perfectly attuned to her material—quirky, sometimes near archaic in its rhythms and language, plain-spoken but lyrical. . . . You may not come away from this novel with all the answers about love and marriage, but with Dillard as guide, you will begin to know the important questions.” — The Hartford Courant “Dillard’s lush, perfect prose paints a winning portrait of these artistic, opinionated, strong-willed characters who love books, love words, embrace life. . . . Time and love parade before us in The Maytrees, in all their glory. . . . This warm enveloping tale enfolds us like a caress.” — The New Orleans Times-Picayune “ The Maytrees showcases all the reasons people worship Dillard. . . . The Maytrees has elegant, evocative language. It describes nature in a way that would enchant the most hardened city dweller. And it captures the mystery of love, maternal as well as romantic. This novel is a treasure. . . . Dillard writes so beautifully about the ocean, the clouds, the stars, the bogs and the sand that the landscape becomes the most memorable character of this novel. . . . The Maytrees is the perfect beach book for the serious reader.” — USA Today “Exquisite. . . . Few American writers can describe the ecology of a region quite like Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard. In her slim, poetic new novel, The Maytrees , she turns those descriptive muscles on a man and a woman—lovers—bound by their commitment and the landscape against which their rocky affair unfolded. . . . The Maytrees follows their courtship, romance and early marriage with a fine-tuned eye and an amusing ear.” — John Freeman, The Cleveland Plain Dealer “A meditation on love and forgiveness.” — The Wall Street Journal “Wonderful. . . . Annie Dillard is a writer of unusual range, generosity, and ambition. . . . Her prose is bracingly intelligent, lovely, and humane. . . . Dazzling. . . . The Maytrees is a love story of an unusually adult and contemporary kind.” — Margot Livesey, The Boston Globe “Dillard’s poetic descriptions seem to grow up out of the sand and seafoam, and the images she puts into your mind, playfully rendered and wonderfully precise, are spellbinding. Ultimately, this is a story of great tenderness.” — The Arizona Republic “In the union of Toby and Lou Maytree we see what could be the ideal marriage: companionship, intimacy, contentment, and love that needs no words. But amid all this reassurance and coziness, the Maytrees’ lives are turned upside down. . . . Then this becomes a story of survival and repose, of a mother and son finding peace for themselves.” — Elle “Brilliant. . . . A shimmering meditation on the ebb and flow of love. . . . The author also weaves recurring images and themes through the narrative with supreme grace. . . . As in all of Ms. Dillard’s writing, transcendent moments abound. ” — The New York Times “Dillard’s novel, about a torturous affair, captures the solitude of Provincetown in spare descriptions of character and landscape.” — New York Magazine “A simple, elegant tale. . . . Thought and solitude and the mystery of being, death and love and the sea, dwell at the center of this spare and graceful novel.” — The San Diego Union-Tribune “The charm here is in the telling. . . . Dillard’s look at love and distance is engagingly intimate.” — Boston Magazine “[F]ull of the kind of pleasures one looks for in fiction. . . . The novel as a whole is beautiful, and the beauty is never digressive or ornamental. . . . This is where Dillard’s imagination has always lived, in the stark and lyrical awareness of the profundity of the physical world.” — Washington Post Book World “Gorgeous. . . . Deeply meditative. . . . One of the most lucid and effective books Dillard has ever produced. Certainly one of the most affecting. . . . A novel of almost drastic austerity.” — Slate “Annie Dillard is, was and always will be the very best at describing the landscapes in which we find ourselves. The Maytrees is as much an exegesis on love and time as it is the story of a marriage. . . . There is no denying that when you have finished this slim book, you have looked over a jewel and seen its beauty.” — The Minneapolis Star Tribune “A spare and subtle novel. . . . Like Thoreau, Dillard takes us to that place of rugged independence, that struggle of making a living without forfeiting the mind.” — The Chicago Sun-Times “Intelligent and poetic. . . . Dillard’s prose is rich, as is her dive into the too-often-shallow waters of love and deception. . . . The Maytrees will not disappoint.” — The Rocky Mountain News “A very good book. . . . Nobody writes nature better than Annie Dillard. There’s nobody more alive to the nuances of its pulsing (and sometimes menacing) fecundity. In The Maytrees, the sand dunes and waves of Cape Cod function almost as characters. . . . Dillard seems incapable of writing a bad or graceless sentence; this novel is full of beautifully concise sentences that convey precisely what they need to convey without drawing undue attention to themselves.” — The Globe and Mail “Breathtakingly illuminative. . . . Beautifully told. . . . Dillard has accomplished the reader’s payoff she so relentlessly detailed almost 20 years ago in The Writing Life . She too has pressed upon us ‘the deepest mysteries.’” — The New York Times Book Review “Bracingly intelligent, lovely, and humane. . . . Dazzling. . . . The Maytrees is a love story of an unusually adult and contemporary kind.” — Margot Livesey, The Boston Globe “A reservoir of oceanic language, thrilling and sophisticated assumptions of reader intelligence and elegantly lean descriptive detail. . . . Dillard knows how to create Eden on the page . . . exquisite.” — Los Angeles Book Review “Dillard’s examination of all manner of human interactions is nuanced, and her evocation of Cape Cod is at once precise and gorgeous.” — The Atlantic “Poignant. . . . Dillard, like the best of naturalists, creates memorable poetic images. . . . If the purpose of literature is to teach us how to live, Dillard has succeeded.” — The Houston Chronicle “A book worth pondering. Its seeming simplicity is seductive enough to draw the reader into the questions that Dillard poses and then to strike with unexpected emotional power. Once again, Dillard takes on the big questions of life, love and meaning in a fresh and intriguing way.” — The Christian Century “The Maytrees is a quiet masterpiece. . . . Dillard’s prose slips from the natural to the human with quicksilver grace. . . . Life by sea and starlight is simple and rich, conveyed by Dillard with Thoreau’s eye for the natural world. . . . As well as Herman Melville, something of Dillard’s great Catholic compatriot Flannery O’Connor is there in her unremitting sense of both doom and wonder, in the beauty of her prose and the boldness of her structure.” — The Financial Times “In her elegant, sophisticated prose, Miss Dillard tells a tale of intimacy, loss and extraordinary friendship and maturity against a background of nature in its glorious color and caprice. The Maytrees is an intelligent, exquisite novel.” — The Washington Times “In The Maytrees Dillard remains nominally loyal to those values that make her earlier writings both disturbing and rewarding: patience, the attention to particularity, the emptying of the self, and the submission of the will to necessity.” — The London Review of Books Annie Dillard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, The Writing Life, The Living and The Maytrees . She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Maytrees A Novel By Annie Dillard HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright © 2008 Annie DillardAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780061239540 Chapter One It began when Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree first met. He was back home in Provincetown after the war. Maytree first saw her on a bicycle. A red scarf, white shirt, skin clean as eggshell, wide eyes and mouth, shorts. She stopped and leaned on a leg to talk to someone on the street. She laughed, and her loveliness caught his breath. He thought he recognized her flexible figure. Because everyone shows up in Provincetown sooner or later, he had taken her at first for Ingrid Bergman until his friend Cornelius straightened him out. He introduced himself. —You're Lou Bigelow, aren't you? She nodded. They shook hands and hers felt hot under sand like a sugar doughnut. Under her high brows she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls' schools, he recalled later. Those girls looked straight at you. Her wide eyes, apertures opening, seemed preposterously to tell him, I and these my arms are for you. I know, he thought back at the stranger, this long-limbed girl. I know and I am right with you. He felt himself blush and knew his freckles looked green. She was young and broad of mouth and eye and jaw, fresh, solid and airy, as if light rays worked her instead of muscles. Oh, how a poet is a sap; he knew it. He managed to hold his eyes on her. Her rich hair parted on the side; she was not necessarily beautiful, or yes she was, her skin's luster. Her pupils were rifle bores shooting what? When he got home he could not find his place in Helen Keller. He courted Lou carefully in town, to wait, surprised, until his newly serious intent and hope firmed or fled, and until then, lest he injure her trust. No beach walks, dune picnics, rowing, sailing. Her silence made her complicit, innocent as beasts, oracular. Agitated, he saw no agitation in her even gaze. Her size and whole-faced smile maddened him, her round arms at her sides, stiff straw hat. Her bare shoulders radiated a smell of sun-hot skin. Her gait was free and light. Over her open eyes showed two widths of blue lids whose size and hue she would never see. Her face's skin was transparent, lighted and clear like sky. She barely said a word. She tongue-tied him. She already knew his dune-shack friend Cornelius Blue, knew the professors Hiram and Elaine Cairo from New York, knew everyone's friend Deary the hoyden who lived on the pier or loose in the dunes, and old Reevadare Weaver who gave parties. Bumping through a painter's opening, picking up paint at the hardware store, ransacking the library, she glanced at him, her mouth curving broadly, as if they shared a joke. He knew the glance of old. It was a summons he never refused. The joke was—he hoped—that the woman had already yielded but would set him jumping through hoops anyway. Lou Bigelow's candid glance, however, contained neither answer nor question, only a spreading pleasure, like Blake's infant joy, kicking the gong around. Maytree concealed his courtship. On the Cairos' crowded porch, she steadied her highball on the rail. He asked her, Would she like to row around the harbor with him? She turned and gave him a look, Hold on, Buster. He was likely competing with fleets and battalions of men. Maytree wanted her heart. She had his heart and did not know it. She shook her head, clear of eye, and smiled. If he were only a painter: her avid expression, mouth in repose or laughing, her gleaming concentration. The wide-open skin between her brows made their arcs long. Not even Ingrid Bergman had these brows. The first few times he heard her speak, her Britishy curled vowels surprised him. He rarely dared look her way. One day he might accompany Lou Bigelow from town out here to his family's old dune shack. He was afraid his saying "shack" would scare them both. Without her he already felt like one of two pieces of electrical tape pulled apart. He could not risk a mistake. Robert Louis Stevenson, he read in his Letters , called marriage "a sort of friendship recognized by the police." Charmed, Maytree bought a red-speckled notebook to dedicate to this vexed sphere—not to marriage, but to love. More red-speckled notebooks expanded, without clarifying, this theme. Sextus Propertius, of love: "Shun this hell." From some book he copied: "How does it happen that a never-absent picture has in it the power to make a fresh, overwhelming appearance every hour, wide-eyed, white-toothed, terrible as an army with banners?" She was outside his reach. Of course she glared at Maytree that fall when he came by barefoot at daybreak and asked if she would like to see his dune shack. Behind his head, color spread up sky. In the act of diving, Orion, rigid, shoulder-first like a man falling, began to dissolve. Then even the zenith and western stars paled and gulls squawked. Her house was on the bay in town. He proposed to walk her to the ocean—not far, but otherworldly in the dunes. She had been enjoying Bleak House . Men always chased her and she always glared. She most certainly did not ask him in. His was a startling figure: his Mars-colored hair, his height and tension, his creased face. He looked like a traveling minstrel, a red-eyed night heron. His feet were long and thin like the rest of him. He wore a billed fishing cap. An army canteen hung from his belt. She had been a schoolgirl in Marblehead, Massachusetts, when he went West. —Just a walk, he said, sunrise. We won't need to go inside. In his unsure smile she saw his good faith. Well, that was considerate, brickish of him, to say that they would not go in. She agreed. She had not seen the dunes in weeks. Maytree suggested she bring, as he did, a pair of socks, to provide webbed feet, and wear a brimmed hat that tied. In predawn light she saw the sunspokes around his eyes under his cap. Continues... Excerpted from The Maytrees by Annie Dillard Copyright © 2008 by Annie Dillard. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. 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