The Maytrees
By Annie Dillard
HarperCollins, 216 pages, $24.95
Imagine a writer setting herself the challenge of creating a novel based on an idea suggested by one of her creative-writing students. Aside from the danger that this germ of an idea that once seemed such a live wire in the classroom might begin to stiffen and resist all efforts to turn it into respectable fiction, the sheer size of the commitment is staggering. A short story based on an intriguing idea is one thing, but a whole, time-devouring novel? What a reckless gamble for a writer to take! Yet this is exactly how Annie Dillard launched herself into the writing of what eventually, after nine years, became “The Maytrees,” a novel set in Provincetown, Mass., the renowned artists’ colony on the shores of Cape Cod, which ponders the joys and mysteries of married love.
An older man in one of Dillard’s classes came up with the story. The novel opens with a young couple falling in love as World War II ends. The lovers marry, start a family and after 12 happy years, their child, out riding his bike, is hit by a car. The aftermath of this life-shattering moment, in which the husband takes a lover and moves to Maine, leaving the wife at home to nurse their child back to health, sets up the tension that becomes the main focus of the novel.
Provincetown’s windswept beaches are familiar territory for this Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who has spent much time over the years walking its dunes and keeping watch on its wildlife. As a setting for her second novel, it seems to represent the abundance of vitality that the Maytrees’ marriage is blessed with from the start. Making a marriage last is something of an art, and the Maytrees are artistic. Toby Maytree, “a poet of the forties and fifties and sixties,” writes book-length narrative poems between house moving and remodeling gigs for friends. His wife, Lou Bigelow, besides bearing a striking likeness to Ingrid Bergman, dances, paints the occasional watercolor and reads.
In the first days of their courtship, Lou spends a lot of time wondering if, by failing to tell Toby of her nearly bottomless need for solitude, she is, in a sense, leading him astray. She contrasts her intense, introspective nature with the exotic lives of the denizens of Provincetown, among them the stylish, much-divorced Deary Hightoe, who plays drums in a jazz band and models for a painting class on the beach. In this vague, dreamy state, Lou marries Toby. After the ceremony, he leaves his beach shack to live with her in the house she and her mother fled to after her father, a lawyer, abandoned them.
Undoing the sins of the father becomes Lou’s task in life. In an oblique aside early on, we learn how parting from Maytree after a brief encounter in town can shake her up: “She had been liking the way his hips set loosely, his shoulders tightly, his long wide-smiling face, pale eyes back under thick brows, alert. She stood in danger outside her door. What was she afraid of? Of her heartbeat, of his over-real eyes, of her breathing, everything.”
Every long marriage is a bumpy ride, fraught with the danger of running off course, which may be what that declaration foreshadows. After Lou marries Toby, physical intimacy becomes the next fear-tinged obstacle to knowing for sure whether they really belong together:
“[S]he learned to feel their skin as double-sided. They felt a pause. Theirs was too much feeling to push through the crack that led down to the dim world of time and stuff. That world was gone. They held themselves alert only in those few million cells where they touched . . . she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? . . . She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.” What, exactly, is the attraction between Lou and Toby, aside from a love of reading, walking and possibly hard partying with other artists? A mysterious reluctance on the part of the narrator to bring any character, action or plot twist into sharp (or deep) focus makes the reader wonder if the book is being written by a literary water spider flitting across the surface of a pond. It is by turns a meditation on life and love in an artists’ colony and a tragic story of forgiveness in families, and the overall impression is of a narrator not so much alive as struggling, at times adroitly and at times clumsily, for life.
A clumsy moment after the bicycle accident, between Toby and his lover, Deary Hightoe, in Maine:
“Deary welcomed Maytree into her arms with gales of laughter that beaded on her gums. Then she slept palms together under her cheek like a charade for sleep.”
Can you picture that? I can’t. Dillard is better at bestowing a windfall on the abandoned, near-penniless Lou back in Provincetown:
“A bank wrote her. Her vamoosed father, who left their Marblehead house after breakfast and never came back, had died in Edgartown — so near, all these years, and here he was, gone — and left her money.”
Dark shadows of marital dysfunction and bad behavior haunt the novel, but not for long. What is Lou’s reaction when Toby turns up on Lou’s doorstep 20 years later with the sick Deary, begging to be taken in? Forgiveness:
“How she had enjoyed having him around, his easy competence and camaraderie. How grand of him to help her take care of Deary! (Oh, they don’t make them like that anymore; it’s just as well.)”
It is one thing to maintain unflappability in the face of failure and loss, but if this is the case, shouldn’t Lou at least be given an inkling of the instability of character that led her to this blind turn? Dillard has all she needs in terms of imagination, and she is handy with the witty rejoinders. But her characters are ciphers. Had she entrusted her storytelling instincts to a less-self-conscious narrator, she and the reader might have stood a better chance of some kind of communion.
A novel in which two book-surrounded, deeply introspective main characters demonstrate the depth of their regard for each other by thinking about, rather than revealing, their feelings quickly develops an overdependence on interior monologue. Unless the technique is used to highlight some mysterious failing or misreading of outward appearances, readers have a tendency to disengage from characters who perceive themselves as the center of the universe.
It is a tribute to Dillard’s stubbornness and fearlessness as a novelist that even in the face of what she has said were hundreds of pages of research and 1,400 pages of narrative, she refused to hit the delete key and be done with it. Her singular devotion to paring down the piles of historical data on place and weather and the many, many stories that must have cropped up during the writing of the main love story into a book worth reading surely rivals the devotion of her novel’s main character, Lou Bigelow, to Toby Maytree, the man who nearly got away.
In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Dillard explained how she wrote “The Maytrees,” and her theory that the contemporary novel is being ruined by the computer: “You’re so bored with the story after nine years that little side stories get more interesting, and you devote many more days to them and they’re completely peripheral.” Well, boredom is a subjective reaction, but if a story bores its author, how can she expect a less-partial reader to wade through it?
Images of movement, especially of weather and atmosphere, abound in “The Maytrees.” As my grandmother, a school teacher, used to say when she caught her granddaughters lolling about the house, daydreaming out the window, “Too much attention to weather makes for instability of character.”
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Conan Putnam’s writing has appeared in the Seattle Review, The Sewanee Review, Real Simple and the Tribune Magazine.
