Who wants to be gutted like a fish? Not I. But it’s how I describe the experience of reading Annie Dillard’s most recent novel The Maytrees: spliced and filleted by her words. Dillard’s writing puts the mind to work. There’s more mileage in any one paragraph than in most books. Her command of language is surprising as the breadth of her vocabulary. Reading her work makes me realize I need to start thumbing through the dictionary, my brain tired and stretched into a new sort of fitness.
You will get no notion of an unblemished life or romantic love in the novel, though it might seem that way at first. And you might want it to be the case. I struggled with evasion throughout the narrative, frustrated by how the story branched and jutted outside of my expectation. But when it comes to literature, sentimentality often kills the cat, or at least makes the story feebly purr.
Maytree constantly asks questions about the nature of commitment and romantic love as he writes notes down in pink notebooks and tries to hack out his way as a writer of the long poem. The choices he makes before and after his fourteen years with Lou seem always to be informed by compromise – the inevitable crux of existence – not least of which, we learn, is his stunning frustration that death is part of life.
But the main thrust of the narrative turns on his inexplicable, unapologetic decision. Maytree leaves. The bastard. He does. The story changes as a result. The relationships, the family, the course of Pete and Lou’s lives. But many things remain, including love. We might not understand how or why, but they do. And therein the rub.
The question that rips through the heart of the novel is What guides the will – reason? passion? and is love an act of the will or is it an obligation? Circumstances in the characters’ lives, and Lou’s near maddening unflappability, might make you throw your mother’s wedding china against the wall. The questions are never asked of the other in the novel, only of the self.
Lou never bends or breaks. And surely not aloud. She wills, she reasons, she obliges. The water never boils over; only boils then steeps a lovely cup of kindness.
Dillard, who in the snippet bio at her book’s end is described as “a gregarious recluse,” writes a story of characters who are sympathetic and real but hardly knowable. The reasons for their decisions are hidden from the reader and from themselves, and questions about social conventions, love, the fury and beauty of the mundane fill the pages of the text and weigh the last ones especially.
This is as much a story about love and shame, perhaps redemption, as it is about the interior life: things left unknown and unsaid and the questions and suggestions that linger as people act in real time out of their silences. It’s about the life we can only ever live away from everyone else, especially the ones we share life with and love. About the places we can go that no others can follow, even if they return to us and are embraced in our open arms.
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Annie Dillard, The Maytrees. Harpers Collins Publishers, 2007.
