Venus Rising

Film & BooksIssue: Gemini 08

The Maytrees

Although “The Maytrees” by Annie Dillard is marketed as a novel, it reads from beginning to end as a poem. Like body surfing, the poetry will move emotions in directions that the mind may not understand. When this wave brought me to shore, I needed air and I wasn’t quite certain where I had been or where I had landed, but I was, in the truest sense of the word, in awe of the experience I just had. Like “The Great Gatsby” by Fitzgerald, after a first read, the brilliant language must be reread, and in some cases looked up in a dictionary. Though there are various references to literary greats throughout this novel, the core of the Maytree’s marriage is one that all families will benefit from knowing and all can relate to their efforts to define love.

THE MAYTREES By Annie Dillard
216 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $24.95.

Set in Cape Cod after World War II, the story begins with Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree instantaneously falling into a fiercely passionate love. Lou is a painter. Toby is a poet and carpenter. Together they create a life that appears to be charmed in its simplicity, yet it is rich with an expression of all that is life. Petie is born. Lou wants more children but when she claims to love her son more than any other being, the story turns in a rather unexpected and scandalous direction. Toby is 42 when he allows Deary, a friend of Lou’s, to put his marriage in danger. (According to Dillard and Japanese culture, 42 is a dangerous age.) Deary splits Toby’s and Lou’s marriage apart like an axe splits wood. What follows is a careful examination of the lines that define a family tree, a family that Deary was not truly a part of for she had no offspring with Toby and no biological ties to the Maytrees. It is this tie, a love that only family can understand, that brings Toby back to Lou and Petie.

Wishing and doing, within the realm of the possible, was willing; love was an act of will. Not forced obeisance, but – what?  The obvious course of decency?  Innate knowledge of goodness?  Was it reasonable to love the good and good to love the reasonable?  What a crashing bore. The painter’s wife was such a peach.

Toby Maytree ponders this point only after Lou has accepted him and Deary in her home. This being the very home that once celebrated her marriage to Toby and decades later defines Toby’s dependency on Lou, despite his adulterous ways. Though Deary’s love became a divisive wedge in the Maytrees marriage, Toby’s love for his grandson would shelf his desire to write poetry and ultimately keep him near Lou.  

Family love, for better or worse, does not die. Like most families, this novel requires years of re-reading and re-thinking. Annie Dillard needed to cull down what were initially 1400 to 216 pages so that her story could be read. In her interview with NPR she acknowledged that she came to realize that her focus had to be on the central love story. And so, her last novel, which is also her first piece of fiction, is a work of art that will rest on my bookshelf amongst the all-time greats.