Finding buried treasure at a book sale
First Posted:
I make the annual trek to our local libraries’ annual book sales, not only because I’ll get great bargains, but also because I know that one reader’s castaway may turn out to be another’s treasure. Such was the case when I found a slim little book by Annie Dillard at the Dalton Library’s recent sale. She’s best known for her creative nonfiction, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek,” but “The Maytrees” represents one of her rare forays into the world of fiction. Although its plot follows the classic “boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl” formula of romantic comedy, be warned: it’s not the sort of schmaltzy romance novel you can zip through during an afternoon at the beach or pool. Instead, “The Maytrees” is book to savor slowly, the way you’d sip a glass of fine wine.
Set mostly on Cape Cod, that skinny curlicue of land that looks, on maps, like a curved finger beckoning to the Atlantic Ocean, “The Maytrees” tells the story of Toby Maytree, a poet and sometime house-mover and carpenter, and Lou Bigelow, a tall, bookish, and taciturn woman whose beauty is such that Toby first mistakes her for Ingrid Bergman. After a brief, but careful courtship, they marry, and the intensity of their passion sparks in Toby what will be a lifelong effort to decode love’s mysteries.
At first, he’s consumed by the questions of whether men and women love differently, and of who enjoys lovemaking more: the man or the woman? While he ponders these questions, he and Lou live a gentle, uncomplicated life, spending most of their time reading (300 books a year between the two of them), making love, and partying with a collection of raffish and colorful friends, including Deary Hightoe, a free spirit who often sleeps rough on the dunes. In due time, they have a son, Pete, a bright and charming child whose love, at age 11, of fishing foreshadows his eventual occupation. Girls, however, Pete finds “less interesting than frogs, and noisier....He owned rocks he respected more.” Of course that will change.
Dillard structures “The Maytrees,” which is essentially a meditation on love, in five parts, much like an ancient Greek play, and the story of Toby’s and Lou’s marriage takes place in the book’s prologue. At the beginning of what amounts to the second act, the Maytrees have been married for 14 years, and Toby, experiencing what we might consider a mid-life crisis, announces that he is leaving Lou and moving to Maine with Deary. Later, he asks himself whether he left Lou because he had stopped loving her. “Not at all. His abiding heart-to-heart with her merely got outshouted,” he decides. Eventually, he will wonder whether he has actually loved Deary for 20 years, and ruminate on why love, “apparently absolute,” can keeping recurring. Finally, in his 60’s, he decides that lasting love may be simply a matter of “the willful focus of attention.”
Meanwhile, Lou struggles to adjust to the abrupt departure of the man she will never stop loving. Although she enjoys the pleasures that come with being single again – the freedom to read uninterrupted as long as she wants; quiet; eating crackers in bed – she is devastated. Toby’s departure is, after all, the second time she’s been abandoned by a man she loves. When she was 12, her father left for work one morning and never returned. The young Lou watches her mother “tallying her father’s faults and perfidies. She did not know then that polishing this grudge would be her mother’s lone project for the balance of her life.” Perhaps because she doesn’t want to waste her own life, Lou avoids blaming either Toby or Deary, although she is decimated by their betrayal. A strong and determined woman, she decides she will find peace only by choosing to let go.
In the surprising, touching, and totally satisfying last “acts” of “The Maytrees,” this love story comes full circle, and in the end, Dillard reverts to her abiding interest in the natural world to describe how Lou, now in her late 60’s, imagines what will happen to all she has learned when she dies. “Bacteria would unhook her painstakingly linked neurons and fling them over their shoulders and carry them home to chew up for their horrific babies,” she decides. This thought bothers her not at all; she has always accepted the realities of life and death.
In her nonfiction book, “The Writing Life,” Dillard says readers hope that writers “will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness....” “The Maytrees” demonstrates that she can practice what she preaches. By giving us a character like Lou, whose compassion, generosity of spirit, and ability to love and forgive serve as examples of how to live a meaningful life, Dillard both illuminates and inspires. Her philosophical flights and compressed, evocative language require the same careful concentration you would give when reading a wonderful poem, but you won’t be sorry. After all, any real treasure is worth the effort it takes to unearth it.
