The Maytrees: A Novel
by Annie Dillard
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Book Summary Information
Author: Annie DillardEdition: Hardcover
Published: 2007-06-01
ISBN: 0061239534
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Book Reviews of The Maytrees: A Novel
Book Review: Deeply Beautiful
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of The Maytrees: A Novel
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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