Towards the conclusion of Annie Dillard's novel, The Maytrees, a character contemplates writing a book-length poem. He chooses "There Will Be a Sea Battle Tomorrow" for his title. Dillard points out that he's referencing Aristotle's problem - basically, how true are statements about the future? Is the battle fought tomorrow or not? Is either statement true, until the event actually occurs? Is Schrödinger's cat alive or dead? What's going on inside that black box?The whole book goes on like this. Dillard strands her novel with taut, practical people, immersed in crafts like carpentry, fishing, housecare, childrearing. Then she cuts at them, with hard turns of fate and the inevitable shambles of old age. Then she wonders, is there anything left inside? After people grow up (and after the century grows up), is there anything left of what we used to be? After they're scoured and pulled at and they fall down stairs, what is left to hold them together in all the broken spots?She writes these winnowings in precise, deliberate prose - preferring a technical word to a commonplace description, preferring archaic or obsolete latinisms to domesticated, well-handled words. Too often her words stepped forth from their place as character development, description, or irony, and said to me, "Pay attention: you are reading a closely-written and highly poetic novel, which thinks about the nature of being." This becomes tiresome. Often she writes in the same key as Marilynne Robinson, hitting some notes of beauty in placid daily life. The passages where Maytree wanders the dunes, or when people find their way on land by star-reckoning, come to mind. The constellations, in particular Orion, are very important to these characters, living on Cape Cod. At times like this, the novel sinks into the characters' world, so that we must accept its logic, as readers, but are all the while reminded of its strangeness. I don't know how to bait eel-traps with horseshoe crabs, for instance.But then there's sentences like "Awareness was a braided river. It slid down time in drops or torrents." Or, "Under tires dry snow yelped." Or, "Now in compassion they bore, between them, their solitudes each the size of the raveled globe." These are meant to be deliberate, careful & quiet - so close to the lyric style in poetry that it's hard to remember why they're not. But throughout this book I thought of a stray comment in Kingsley Amis' novel The Green Man. Maurice is reading a modern novel, which is so clotted with fanciful description that he gets nothing out of it. Finally he puts it down in exasperation, thinking of those "barbaric" works of art where every inch of a piece of wood must be worked over, infested with decoration. Nowhere did I think that the story was standing still to no purpose, or that Dillard was just delighting in her own powers to crystallize (cf. Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone). But I did keep thinking that perhaps this book was not written for me. Dillard seems to be looking forward to the next hack, tear, or misapprehension she can inflict on her creations. Not, thankfully, for the shock value or the "realness" - but so she can send them on thinking about how precious everything is, and how their lives are at once in sync with the stars and meaningless compared to them, etc. She can't hardly wait for her characters to get old, develop weeping bed sores and cracked bones slowly mending, so she can send them off into the ether of her philosophical speculations. Also, most of these philosophical digressions boil down to, "Man, doesn't science disillusion you? Doesn't life seem pretty pointless when you think about how you're going to die?" Which doesn't help.The opening chapters are sweet & have a direct pleasure to them. But even then, these characters seem like very old people, dressed up in shorts and tank tops and swim suits, larking around the sand dunes. She describes the freshness of a first date, where a young girl strains to get up a sandhill because her feet slip back half as far as they've gotten. But then this is echoed, pitifully, when her estranged husband has the same problem, in his frailty. The cumulative effect of these links (and there are many - big empty holes, the red-eyed vireo, etc.) implies that beauty is precious, that we front the world always with our frailties and our limited view of it.But this thinning stringency saps the Maytrees of independence. They never quite came alive for me. I was interested to read on here that Annie Dillard edited this book down to its present 216 pages (my edition) from over 1,000 pages. It shows. Editing demands ruthlessness. This is a book concerned with showing that the author is utterly indifferent, that her characters are not some soppy knot of emotion, but a carefully constructed arrangement of beauties, like a constellation. But do the stars in a constellation care what we call them?
It sort of killed me to rate this book so low, but there it is. I blame my lack of interest in this book mostly on the low-level of literature reading I've been doing lately and not on Dillard's writing. Had I read this book while in college, along side books that were giving me headaches like 'Paradise Lost', I'm sure that I would've been elated by a book that is so simple and elegant in so many ways.Alas, I just didn't care. I've become far too much of a narrative junkie and the narrative here was either too complex or too meandering for me to give a rat's a. Too many perspectives, too broad a time span and no "dialogue tags". People talking through dashes -quote, thus removing the immediacy of all action, was slightly disappointing.The great thing: it's a writer's book. You know how people say that some music is a 'musicians' music'. That's what this book is, a writer's book. At least, the only things I found myself enjoying were those subtlies of craft that I'm not sure the casual reader would care much for (that is the casual reader of mainstream crap-if your general level of reading falls closer to award-winners and critcally acclaimed literature, then this might be just what you've been looking for). Her descriptions were original and resonant. The sentence structure spoke to her mastery of the language in written form. Her voice was so strong at times I felt mine might be drowned out forever. Alas, all I needed to make this near-divine experience wholly satisfying was a story that made me give a damn. And I simply didn't care, either about her tenderly drawn-out characters or the simplicity of grace through which their lives were followed.
What do You think about The Maytrees (2007)?
Good and strange. I felt a bit cheated by Annie. The book is strangely 'ungrounded' - snippets and particles of tangible story throughout, but somehow lacking any GLUE, anything to make my heart move. I can't critique the content or the language - as usual her language is almost separate FROM her writing - it is as though she uses words and language in and of themselves and doesn't always concern herself with where it leads or what they do.The analogy that keeps coming to my mind is a brilliant film that someone is fastforwarding - they stop at a poignant scene and press "play" - you watch - and you can see that the actors are acting brilliantly, the moment is rich, the dialogue eloquent and honest - and then the bastard presses fastforward again - and you go to another scene.I worship Annie as a writer and a wordsmith. And I felt cheated by Maytrees as a whole.
—Charis
I really love Annie Dillard. I cannot express how "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" shook my world, only to say that I refuse to let anyone borrow my worn paperback copy not because I'm worried about not getting it back, but because I am so mortified by some of the 18-year-old thoughts I scribbled in the margins the first time read it. That's how bad it is.So, it's hard to express my level of disappointment with "The Maytrees." It's a book that is far to contemplative to be fiction, let alone a story about love. Furthermore, the characters are so far in their heads that it's difficult to imagine they are real. (I don't know about you, but good fiction means characters that I can believe in, no matter how fantastical they are.)I say leave the big thoughts for the creek, Annie.The saving grace of this story, and the reason I give it three stars, is because there are beautiful moments that remind me of why I think Dillard is such a brilliant writer. For example, the main character Lou Maytree is one day thinking about her grown son, Petie. Dillard writes that if Lou could have it her way, she would collect all the Peties that ever existed, ages 0, 2 years, three days and five hours old, 22 years old, and so on and put them in a room together. I can imagine that for most parents, it is difficult to let go of all the incarnations of their children and this passage I found touching and well written.In the meantime, I've decided to give Tinker another round...
—Cat
I got myself in a snit over the review in the NY Times Book Review and sent the editor the following: To the Editor:Certainly Annie Dillard’s new novel, The Maytrees, deserved a more perceptive — indeed, a more proficient — reader than Ms. Reed (July 29). One wonders if she has ever considered the punning irony of her name, as she managed to stumble upon the key sentences of the novel under review, failed to recognize their import, and then admitted in print to being unable to parse them.“Then there are passages that not even the O.E.D. could help me with,” says Ms. Reed, quoting: “Falling in love, like having a baby, rubs against the current of our lives: separation, loss, and death. That is the joy of them.” Ms. Dillard’s novel explores these “against the current” forces of romantic and parental love on level after level. An astute reader would have understood that the child of the titular couple would have “alewife thoughts” — another phrase Ms. Reed claimed not to understand — as alewives swim “against the current” to “fall in love” and “have babies.” That such sentences and phrases were salient enough for even Ms. Reed to notice them shows how powerful and perfectly chosen all of Ms. Dillard’s words actually are.I suggest Ms. Reed spend a bit more time with her trusty dictionaries and The Maytrees. If she starts right at the title, she may find just how deftly and deeply the book is constructed — how under-written. Maytree is, of course, a pun on the Sanskrit word maitri, meaning an abiding loving-kindness without attachment. It is also a common name for the hawthorn tree, suggesting another great American writer who explored themes of love and its dilemmas in New England communities.
—Donald
