|
| The Maytrees: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Annie Dillard
Publisher: HarperCollins
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $10.92
You Save: $14.03 (56%)
New (7) Used (8) from $8.60
Avg. Customer Rating:  56 reviews
Sales Rank: 541391
Format: Bargain Price
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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
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.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 51 more reviews...
 Annie Has A Way With Words--To Say The Least June 12, 2007
78 out of 86 found this review helpful
It's a slim book about a four-letter word. Annie Dillard's new novel, a spare 224 pages, is essentially a love story. The Maytrees is about the marriage of Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree. Set in Provincetown, Cape Cod, they meet just after World War II. They fall in love and marry. Then life happens. A child is born. An accident occurrs. There is a betrayal. Time passes and people age. Then there is a time for returning home. That's the bare bones of the matter. Only, what matters more--as this story is told, more than merely what happens--is how these characters think about what happens. Theirs is a rich life of the mind, quietly reflecting on the choices they've made, and how to live with them. (Bones, however bare and broken, do figure into the story as well.)
In other words, and not many words, this novel is more a telling of how these two individuals come to understand the nature and meaning of love within the context of their own unfolding and unconventional story. As Maytree himself works it out, "The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock."
In The Maytress, love (What is it? How is it made? Can it be done?) is precisely the question. And it is the one question that asks so much of everyone, perhaps no one more than Lou herself. For Lou, who once could be mistaken for Ingrid Bergman, might well be mistaken later on for the classic patient and long-suffering wife, to say nothing of the prospect of canonization. But, she'd think nothing of the kind. What she ends up doing (and it's a stunner!) is something she thinks"anyone would" do. Perhaps we're are all potentially capable of such feats both sacred and mundane. I have my doubts. But I also wonder if the saints are not somehow or other aware of their sainthood from an early age? For, in her adolescence and after her father left her mother, abandoning the family altogether, Lou made a telling self-discovery. "Aware how keenly she would miss any who vanished, she never considered loving less. This odd idea stuck in her mind." Then later, of a college romance with "a reckless cellist," she decided that "she liked loving, renounced being loved, and only rarely thought of slitting his throat."
Then there's that impertinent question. Really, it's a thinly disguised spin off of the one big question of love. It's the question that suddenly occurs to you when you are The Prodigal whatever. It hits you in the face exactly like the slamming of a screen door, just when it's too late and you're already on your way: Is it a good time to come home when you have to?
Somehow or other, this fictional story rings true. At the very least, couldn't we all agree that true love should go beyond mere feelings and conventional morality? Perhaps the heart itself, instead of being the center of the emotions, is more like the life of the mind. Reflecting when reflected upon, would it not seem that loving turns out in the end to be nothing more (or less) than just enough light as may illuminate even the dullest consciousness into the self awareness of being human...and the determination to act like one! Often defeating our expectations and contrary to appearances, loving is more like grace than justice. More mental than sentimental. Nevertheless, why does true love (as we call it) seem so rare an occurrence, if not altogether a fiction itself? Or, is it so utterly commonplace that, like the holy, we fail to notice it? One thing is clear enough: we are all still students. And one good way of comparing notes is to read. Both the lovers in this tale (lovers also of great literature) turn to books to find some confirmation of their experience. (As when Lou read in Hardy, "It may be observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in." ) So, yes--it's a love story. That's what this uncluttered, thoughtful, funny and quietly heartbreaking novel is all about--in so many (not many) words.
Did I mention funny? Perhaps that sounds like a strange claim to make, given the story I've described thus far. But, readers of Annie Dillard know better. We've come to expect, and are not disappointed here, that her comic timing and dry wit will turn up in the most unexpected places. Just as Maytree turned up at Lou's door. "Lord love a duck." No belly laughs here, to be sure. But there are throughout plenty of subtle turns, observed ironies, and here and there, the well-placed punch line. My favorite bit: the brief conversation over breakfast between Maytree and Lou, after the night he returned home.
--Where's the mirror?
--I took it down. There's a hand mirror in the drawer.
--Took it down? Why?
--It wanted products.
Annie does have a way with words. And maybe it's just me, but for some of the words--words like: halyard, pauciloquoys, culch, mesoglea, spicules, and littoral--I had to have the American Heritage Dictionary, fourth edition, faithfully by my side to refer to rather frequently. What good fortune for me then that Annie Dillard, so I noticed, also just happened to be on that dictionary's usage panel. (Why shouldn't a novel stretch one's vocabulary as well as one's heart, mind and imagination?) But, just what in the sam hill was I supposed to make of "palpating mastitis in zebus"? I tried googling that one and picked up incomprehensible (to me at least) hits like "improving the reproductive management of dairy cattle." (Clearly, Annie and I are not reading the same books.)
One of our most gifted writers has written an excellent novel, narrating her story, if not simply, at the very least truly and succinctly. In heaven, Professor Strunk beams! She's pared down her precise choice of words to only what is essential to the story alone. If it were live theater, this intimate drama would play out before us upon a stage with few props and no scenery. And we would leave the play, as we do this book, feeling more than we could speak, with lots to think about.
The Art of the Personal June 26, 2007
42 out of 54 found this review helpful
I do not know Annie Dillard's personal life other than what she has chosen to reveal in her works. Nor do I want to or even think I should. Yet there is something innately and intensely personal about this novel of hers. As if fragmented and disguised in beauty, Dillard chose to reveal her deepest core. Maytree the husband, scientist and would-be-poet. Lou,the wife. Recluse, practical, saintly in a non-religious way. The way a stone is saintly if you look at it the right way. Dillard's two soul strands: the naturalist and mystic, alive here in the absorbing story of a soul-making in and by way of learning to love through marriage. And is not all soul-making really a marrying of the diffuse energies that combust within us? I have read all of Annie Dillard's works. Some a few times. Here I see her weaving secretly (even impishly) her final, working, wordless definition of love. One that cannot be told in any way than by a story that enters the dazzled and captivated heart as if it were music.
Salivate over Dillard's Wisdom, Compassion, Storytelling Talent, Forgiveness, Ruthlessness, and Abiding Faith in Nature June 19, 2007
29 out of 35 found this review helpful
Dillard is one of, if not perhaps the greatest, living poet and writer.
Her books ebb and flow with the gorgeosity of existence, an exaltation and a high-five to being alive.
This story is compelling; its simplicity tugs at your heart, while its understated orginiality leaves you breathless. How is Dillard capable of this, of squeezing such wisdom and beauty from a time and a place and a family? She SHOWS you, in so many words, lifetimes in a page. I came to understand myself in a more compassionate and loving way while reading this novel. I can't say that about many books- perhaps only this one.
 She Surfaced Like a Dynamited Bass September 8, 2007
26 out of 28 found this review helpful
Believe it or not, this is the description of the book's saint-like protagonist after making love.
What's up with Annie Dillard? Is she out of control, or is the level of her genius such that merely mortal minds (like mine) have trouble comprehending?
Surprising to say, I think it's the latter.
Here's a sampling of other quotations....
*After they married she learned to feel their skin as double-sided.
*His brain lobes seemed to part like clouds over sun.
*Everything he saw was lower than his socks.
*It was this loping shore of mineral silence people meant when they said "the dunes".
*Above the Atlantic's rim she saw a rain's fallstreaks curve.
*She and Petie laughed to flout fate by smashing together, thigmotropic.
*Low tide smelled like green pennies.
*She scoured the sink till the sponge reverted to spicules.
*He witnessed ghost parts and motes on parade disappear.
*Graywacke stones, dirty sea ice, stubby far plane.
*From solid citizens they sublimed to limbless metaphysicians.
*The swale drained the dunes like a vein.
*Sometimes in the middle of their sleep, in the back of the night with the metal wind and stars forcing the room through the window, they woke together as if at a quake.
*Having limited philosophy's objects to certainties, Wittgenstein later realized he broke, in however true a cause, his favorite toy, metaphysics, by forbidding it to enter anywhere interesting.
*Her brain would deliquesce too, and with it all that she had learned topside.
*Once he saw a fireball.
So what is this stuff?
It's an existential love story told in otherworldly language.
I couldn't put it down.
 Arcane at best August 12, 2007
23 out of 29 found this review helpful
Not having encountered this author previously, perhaps it was inevitable that there would be a learning curve, but the gradient surpassed anything expected. The author seems to be the master of the terse, difficult to comprehend word, phrase, sentence, etc. Characters are no more than a few fuzzy brush strokes. Scenarios, places, and plot are sketches and fragments at best. For what it's worth, the author admits to cutting her original page count from 1400 to the very generous count of just over 200 small pages. Perhaps prosaic readability went on the chopping block.
To those unfamiliar with this author, break out the dictionaries and other reference materials and be prepared to expend much effort in supplying meaning and context. To fans and highbrow reviewers, a tip of the hat to you who obviously have great powers of perception, if not tolerance.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
