From my blog: http://www.jamesrament.com/book-revie...

The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard (1945-), published in 2007

I'll start with a confession, actually two: First, Annie Dillard is one of those authors that reinforces the fact that sometimes I prefer books to people. I can become engrossed in her writing—contemplating difficult sentences or paragraphs over and over, wondering where meaning is found for us mortals—without a care for humanity at large while doing so. Reading her work is a form of meditation; and I am not alone when I read her work. It is also like spending time with an old friend, which gets to my second admission...her books are old friends that I never quite fully comprehend. But I relish her company anyway. She leaves me at peace in spite of her dangling philosophical questions. Annie Dillard's work has touched me, particularly Holy the Firm (1977) and Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), standouts by my reckoning, read many years ago, and again in 2007. Her novel, The Maytrees (2007), is another notch on her belt, so to speak.

The Maytrees is a short book, only 216 pages, but it took eight years to write. Daniel B. Smith, in a June 28, 2007 Slate magazine review, notes "that the first draft of The Maytrees was 1,400 pages long and that she ruthlessly cut the manuscript down section by section, character by character, syllable by syllable, until nothing superfluous remained. The result is a novel of almost drastic austerity. Dillard offers just enough fact that the reader can grasp the basics of the narrative...Some writers strip down their prose mainly in order to evoke a mood of bleakness or emotional detachment. Dillard strips down her prose because too much action or too much talking would distract from how her characters reflect on what happens and is said." The reflecting is where her characters address some of life's ultimate questions coupled with narrative of simple acts of moving through the day. There is a spiritual quality to this moving. Smith says, "This isn't new of Dillard, not entirely. It is characteristic of her to juxtapose high thought and mundane act; she delights in the fact that a person can strive for universal truths one moment and haggle with a mechanic the next."

Julia Reed's New York Times review of July 29, 2007 is less kind toward Dillard, implying that she reads too much—something I never thought possible—over-using obscure words—I certainly had to look up the word "alewife"—and name dropping: "In her new novel...a meditation on love set on Cape Cod from World War II to the present, there is some of the familiar straining, along with constant evidence of her energetic reading. The gang’s all here, including, but not remotely limited to: Diogenes, Tiresias, Plato and Aristotle; Blake and Kafka; Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Louis Stevenson; Vietnamese legend and prehistoric Aleuts; Wittgenstein, Galileo and, of course, Tolstoy. (When the subject is love, Levin must be summoned.)" Reed seems to be critical throughout but then concludes with, "Now, after a lifetime of probing, pontificating, huffing and puffing, Dillard has accomplished the reader’s payoff she so relentlessly detailed almost 20 years ago in The Writing Life. She too has pressed upon us 'the deepest mysteries.'" So did Reed like the book? It's hard to tell. I know I did. But I happen to like "probing, pontificating, huffing and puffing." Some examples:

On Maytree's idea for a new book length poem, Dillard writes, "Boston or New York embodies our condition in one aspect: We are strangers among millions living in cubes like Anasazi in a world we fashioned. And Provincetown shows, by contrast, that we live on a strand between earth and sky. Here are protoplasmic, peeled people in wind against crystal skies. Our soft tissues are outside, like unearthed and drying worms'. The people in cities are like Mexican jumping beans, like larvae in tequila bottles, soft bits in hard boxes. And so forth. The length to which we as people go to hide our nakedness by blocking sky!" I'll try to remember this idea. Later, on a similar theme, "Lou hoped scandalously to live her own life. A subnormal calling, since civilization means cities and cities mean social norms. She wanted to hear herself think. How else might she hear any original note, any stray subject-and-verb in the head, however faint, should one come?" It is a rather common yearning for us introverts. And another later thought: "But what was solitude for if not to foster decency? Her solitude always held open house...."

"She longed for the life she already possessed, a life large as clouds'" is a unique way of saying one is happy with their lot in life...and it need not be grand in any traditional sense.

Lou commenting on her mother's response to her father's complete departure from them: "Her mother's face hardened and stuck. She never spoke of the man. Lou knew then that her mother was tallying her father's fault's and perfidies. She did not know then that polishing this grudge would be her mother's lone project for the balance of her life." Yes...some of us like to feed our grudges even though it has a way of then defining who we are. Angry young men simply become angry old men.

Words about the son Pete: "He failed to still his bilge. He could replace its slosh with only more slosh. Why was this basic control so almighty tough? Other people appeared to think... He was taking pains to watch his brain take out trash...Why attend this nonsense? Because his hope of mastering himself attracted him." (Emphasis mine)

Pete again, thinking of his father running off to Maine with Deary: "Long ago when he was a boy he tried to talk himself out of hating his father. It worked for a while until the silences piled up... [But] He did not hate them. Observing, he saw that hatred is rare. Envy and begrudging wreck a man first. Other people lived in peace without knotting their brains."

Maytree, thinking of his love: "Early with Lou, then with Deary, and again now, he returned to this: Why can love, love apparently absolute, recur? And recur? Why does love feel it is—know for certain it is—eternal and absolute, every time?"

Lou, commenting on her experiences working at a local nursing home: "All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else's, but their many experiences' having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying, they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human nature—as if each person...would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance." (Emphasis mine)

Amy Frykholm reviewed the book in the October 16, 2007 edition of Christian Century. She says, "This book is a study in character. At its heart is a question about human love... Love remains mysterious, even to lovers, and if love persists over years, over failings, over erosion of time, then it is even more mysterious." It is a book also about mortality; and I cannot improve on Frykholm's final thought: "The Maytrees is a book worth pondering. Its seeming simplicity is seductive enough to draw the reader into the questions that Dillard poses and then to strike with unexpected emotional power. Once again, Dillard takes on the big questions of life, love, and meaning in a fresh and intriguing way."