THE MAYTREES
Annie Dillard
Harper Paperbacks
Fiction
Hardcover: 0061239534
Paperback: 9780061239540

In 1973, Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman directed a film titled Scenes from a Marriage, chronicling the stages of a relationship that culminates in the divorce and eventual reconciliation of the protagonists. That title could have served equally well to describe Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard’s affecting second novel, THE MAYTREES.

The main action of THE MAYTREES takes place in and around Provincetown, the famous artistic community on the tip of Cape Cod. Although the novel’s time span is not spelled out with precision, it encompasses roughly 40 years, beginning shortly after World War II, when Toby Maytree, an aspiring poet and handyman, meets Lou Bigelow, a woman he at first mistook for Ingrid Bergman, “because everyone shows up in Provincetown sooner or later.”

Soon, Toby and Lou are married and the parents of a son, Petie. To all outward appearances, their relationship is idyllic and the bonds that hold them together strong, until the day when Petie suffers a broken leg in a bicycle accident and Toby chooses that occasion to announce he’s leaving Lou after 14 years of marriage to move to Maine with Deary Hightoe, a family friend and something of an eccentric who is fond of sleeping on the beach, swaddled in a canvas sail. Toby and Deary live contentedly in Maine for 20 years, while Lou and Petie (known as “Pete” as he becomes an adult and earns his living as a commercial fisherman) must come to terms with Toby’s abandonment. Eventually, circumstances reunite the characters in Provincetown, and their relationships, in all their complexity, come full circle to bring about a tender and moving resolution.

To some, Toby’s abandonment of his wife and young son will appear inexplicable, but it serves as the underpinning for the intriguing questions Dillard raises in her novel. There’s no simmering conflict that eventually detonates with the announcement of Toby’s departure, no torrid affair with Deary that motivates him. Instead, Toby muses, he simply “fell in love, love unlooked-for.” Dillard’s theme is marital love: what causes that love to blossom and then endure over time, and why does it sometimes slip away despite the best intentions of both partners? “The feeling of love is so crucial to our species,” she observes, “it is excessive, like labor pain. Lasting love is an act of will. It is a gentleman’s game.”

As befits a writer best known for her nature writing in classics like PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK and HOLY THE FIRM, THE MAYTREES is laden with rich descriptive passages portraying the life of nature on Cape Cod. In some ways, THE MAYTREES is an extended lyric poem, filled with captivating imagery. Describing the winter sea, Dillard writes, “Sky ran its candid lengths round the hoop of the horizon. Weak swells spent themselves in muddy sea ice. A tide line of frozen froth like lees stranded in the dead rye.” Or this: “From a white lake of fog opaque as paint, the tips of dunes, and only the tips of dunes, arose everywhere like sand peaks that began halfway up the sky….They lacked nothing but connection to earth and a cause for being loose. They looked like a rendezvous of floating tents.”

Love endures, Dillard concludes, although in the end it may be transfigured into forms barely recognizable to those who perceived its dim outlines at the start. THE MAYTREES is quieter and less turbulent than another classic exploration of married life, James Salter’s LIGHT YEARS. And yet, in a fresh and original way it probes the depths of human relationships, offering a tantalizing glimpse at the truth of how the ties between women and men are forged and tested.

   --- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)

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