I have a claim, a confession, and a crazy explanation. I have read The Maytrees twice, and listened to the audible version—read beautifully by David Rasche—more than a dozen times. In fact, it's approaching twenty times. This is truly strange, even for me. I've never done anything quite like it. But when driving my car, whenever I tire of NPR and the frenzied modern world, I switch off the radio and return, over and over again, to Annie Dillard's portrayal of Provincetown in the '40s, '50s, and '60s, to lives that seem both modest and full of vitality. I'm like a child who desires to hear the same bedtime story repeatedly. I know what befalls Lou and Toby Maytree, Deary Hightoe, and Jane Cairo. It's not the plot that I need; it's the immersion. I yearn for the rhythm of Dillard's sentences and paragraphs, and the gravitational force of the three deaths that form the novel's backbone. I turn on the CD and begin listening once more.

There is one more thing I would love to have from this book. I've read that when Dillard first submitted her manuscript to HarperCollins, it was 1200 pages long. She trimmed it to just over 200 printed pages—and I want to read that entire first version. If only David Rasche would record the whole thing. Give me thirty discs instead of five. There would be so much more to learn about the elation, despair, and hard-won acceptance that these characters have experienced.

I'd like to quote a hundred pages of this book, but I'll settle for the last passage I listened to as I pulled into my driveway last night:

“Pete lifted her wrist, turned it to rest on his thumb, and felt it with three fingertips. The radiator banged. Stars sang in their sockets through the night. Yankee the turtle crawled out from under the couch and stretched his snake neck. He stood square as a pack mule waiting its load, like the lowest totem-pole animal resigned to shouldering all the rest, or resigned to lifting the seas that floated the lands, if this was that kind of world. He regarded dead Deary with the obsidian calm of a god.”

I'm glad I wasn't the only one who took the trouble to look up pauciloquy on page 70. I was also bothered to note that this $110.00 word, meaning "brevity of speech", was not only archaic (as of 1913) and misspelled (Dillard spells it "pauciloquoy"), but also not as good a word choice as "terseness" in my humble opinion.

This word not only describes Lou's character perfectly, but also the writing style in this book that pretends to be a poem, but fortunately isn't.

The book is a bit decadent in word choice and meter (Dillard even uses Joyce's -- to indicate quotation and unfortunately borrowed his habit of omitting the speaker). As seen above, it makes for great teasing (I almost prepared a menu of expensive words she uses in the book for the book club meeting). But unlike Danielewski's latest obfuscation, Dillard's book is highly readable (well, after the first 30 pages of nearly unbearable fawning) and makes for some stirring prose.

Sometimes the narrator or characters will say these really great one-liners that take you aback and make you think hard about what Maytree, Lou, Deary, and Pete are feeling in each scene. For being a "quick read", I sure had to think a lot to read the book, and that's a good sign.

I think the most unnerving part of this book is that it traverses the three main characters' lives from beginning to end, and it's even more disturbing when she describes their deaths. Granted, I don't handle the concept of death and dying well, regardless of how many books I've read that bring it up. But describing how these people die hour by hour really catches me off guard; I and most of the people I know will die in a similar fashion.

In short, this book is wonderfully written. I'd probably have given it four stars if it were more to my liking.

Few authors possess the remarkable ability to turn a phrase as exquisitely as Annie Dillard. While I undeniably have a greater affinity for her non-fiction works compared to her fiction, I still find immense joy in seeing the world through her unique perspective. This particular book, however, had a somewhat depressing effect on me as it struck a chord too close to home in certain aspects. As a result, I will need to select something tonight that will offer me comfort. Nevertheless, I am still glad that I finally managed to find the time to read it. What's more, there is one tiny reference within the book that makes me believe that Annie Dillard is a reader of Pratchett, which brings a smile to my face!

I simply have to share some quotes so that the readers of this review can get a sense of Dillard's beautiful prose. For instance, "No one knew that ordinary breakfast would be there last. Why not memorize everything, just in case?" This line makes one stop and think about the fleeting nature of our daily experiences. Another quote that stands out is "Between them they read about three hundred books a year. He read for facts, she for transport. Nothing about them was rich except their days swollen with time." It paints a vivid picture of two individuals with different reading motivations, yet both finding richness in the abundance of time they have.

There are many other wonderful quotes in the book, such as "Throughout her life she was ironic and strict with her thoughts. She went dancing most Friday nights in town. People said that Maytree, or felicity, or solitude had driven her crazy. People said she had been an ugly girl, or a child movie star; that she inherited fabulous sums and lived in a shack without pipes or wires; that she read too much; that she was wanting in ambition and could have married anyone. She lacked a woman's sense of doom. She did what she wanted - like who else on earth? All her life she found dignity overrated. She rolled down dunes." This passage provides a fascinating insight into the character's complex personality and her disregard for societal norms.

Overall, Annie Dillard's writing is a true delight, even when it delves into the more melancholy aspects of life. Her ability to craft beautiful and thought-provoking sentences is truly remarkable, and I look forward to reading more of her works in the future.

Why surprise? Is all fair? Is love blind? Why sadder but wiser? What else could wisdom be? These are some of Annie Dillard's profound questions in Maytrees. Here are some of mine: What is pomposity? Why care? Are big words better than more appropriate small words? Whither quotation marks? Will you ever stop asking short, choppy questions and tell a readable story?

While I recognized a few short flashes of genius in the writing, such as some touches of real beauty, occasional moments of poetry, and select insights into human life, I had to stop reading at page 86. I might not have minded how pretentious the book was if only it weren't so boring. If only I had been made to care even slightly about the characters. However, the characters seem to float about the story like disembodied souls.

I'm not averse to a diverse vocabulary, but some words seemed to be selected solely for their "look at this big word I'm using" value. Then there is the author's refusal to use quotation marks for dialogue. Quotation marks were invented for a very good purpose: they allow readers to easily judge when speech begins and ends, so that dialogue never appears to flow into narration. Insisting on nonconformity in this matter only punishes the reader in exchange for what - a little self-satisfaction for the author who is presumably bucking the system? The book begins as what looks to be a love story, and then the protagonist, who seemed a decent man, suddenly abandons his wife for no good reason. We do not see the deterioration of the marriage; we just see the abrupt move. Everything seems aimed at an appearance of profundity, but too often, it is just that: an appearance.

The book has a gentle, sad tone. I'm sure it requires a great deal of talent to sustain this mood throughout, but I just don't like the book. Chalk it up to pure personal preference. The vague bleakness of it all... it just makes me YAWN.

The Maytrees, Annie Dillard's 2007 novel, is an almost flawless blend of extraordinary lyricism, story-telling, and character creation.

Long stretches of prose read like poetry, with single sentences being jaw-dropping. There's no point in quoting as there are numerous passages that merit special attention. Why not read the whole book?

As it opens, The Maytrees reads like a modern-day fairy tale. An enchanting woman, Lou, falls in love with a unique man, Maytree, at the tip of Cape Cod. They match up shyly but well. He is a carpenter-poet, while she is a nature-loving painter. Dillard beautifully embeds them in the Cape's wild beauty, with its serried waves, handsome black nights, grasses, scattered fish bones, bird bones, and perhaps a few human bones.

When they marry, it's a relief but not a surprise. As they travel through time together, they complement each other's silences, habits, and delights. Their chorus consists of a group of Provincetown locals in the post-WWII era before Provincetown was overrun by tourists and faddists. They are good, peculiar, self-reliant, and interesting folk.

If Dillard did not write so well, this would become boring. However, she is a prose stylist in the league of William Gass, John Updike, John Fowles, and others like Jim Crace and Richard Powers. Her approach is consistent in rhythm but eclectic in reference. She is a naturalist, a cultural observer, and a wide-ranging reader. In any given paragraph, she may draw from all three fonts of inspiration for images, comparisons, and revelations.

Boredom vanishes when Maytree behaves badly to Lou. He has a midlife crisis, realizing he's not the free spirit he once was. Given their amazingly good marriage, this is hard to believe, but there's a dull thud of reality. Suddenly, he doesn't want to be tamed and doesn't care about his happiness.

Lou isn't the kind of woman a man should mistreat or abandon. Dillard darkens the canvas but sustains the naturalist's setting, couching human experience in the awesome of geology, the ocean, and the sky. There is something reassuring and inevitable about what transpires.

The Maytrees is a short book that reads long due to its dense writing. It would be a crime to read it quickly and a mistake not to read it at all.

In post-war Cape Cod, Toby Maytree encounters Lou Bigelow and promptly falls head over heels in love. They build a life together and start a family, enjoying the company of friends and showering each other with adoration. They are an educated, well-read, and talented couple. Their focus in life is not on amassing wealth but on understanding the full essence of "love" in all its dimensions.

It almost seems too good to be true, bordering on hokey.

However, Toby eventually discovers something outside of Lou that he has been seeking, and the beautiful life they have crafted begins to crumble. Their lives and their feelings for each other ebb and flow like the tides, with their foundation being as fragile as sand. They live on a beach, both in a literal and a metaphorical sense. Dillard skillfully incorporates the instability within stability by using the nature that surrounds her characters. Perhaps she is a naturalist first and a novelist second, but there is poetry in every word she writes. In the story of Toby and Lou, their decisions have a profound impact on each other and those around them. But in the end, despite the pain and hurt they have inflicted on each other, their shared history prevails, and the events that occurred in between no longer hold significance.

This story struck a hidden chord within me - something related to growing old, the balance between friends and lovers, and the fear of the unknown. I'm truly glad it was Dillard who prodded at this particular topic.

For those who had the audacity to complain that Dillard uses "too many big words", for goodness sake, buy a bloody dictionary and expand your pitiful vocabulary. I would be ashamed to admit to being such a lazy reader.

Lyrical, moving, engaging, and short.

Who could ask for anything more? When I completed this book, I seriously contemplated turning back to the very first page and devouring it all over again.

This is truly a keeper.

For instance, "Maytree would resume his life in Maine, and she could pick up her subjects' edges anywhere - in other cultures, in any mind's track, in paleontology, old peckings and runes on stones, in Asian philosophy -...and poke up at the bottom of things with a stick, or however she used to work. She kept an eye on the rifling, fletching, skeg, or keel that trued her aim."

If you are as captivated as I am by the concept that a person has a "rifling, fletching, skeg, or keel", then you will undoubtedly adore this book.

However, be forewarned, it's all of this nature.

If the thought of 216 pages of leisurely description makes you frown or look askance, then perhaps you should move on and peruse something else.

Nonetheless, for those who appreciate the beauty and artistry of language, this book is a hidden gem waiting to be discovered.

It takes you on a journey through the author's vivid imagination, painting pictures in your mind that will linger long after you've turned the last page.

So, if you're ready to embark on a literary adventure, give this book a chance and prepare to be charmed.

It's truly a challenge to determine what to think of this book.

On one hand, you can allow yourself to be completely captivated by its beautiful prose and lose yourself in its lyricism. You can also take great delight in the precise and glowing descriptions of landscapes, seascapes, and emotional states-of-mind.

However, if you are into creative writing, perhaps not as part of a formal course but having internalized its rules from extensive reading of the genre, you might become angry because Dillard breaks all the rules. She mostly tells rather than shows, although it must be said that the telling is truly luminous.

Moreover, her timeline is chaotic, as if she randomly threw darts at a fifty-year calendar. Yet, interestingly, she starts at the beginning and ends at the end, not unlike our lives and the way we reflect upon them.

Moralists might also have an issue with the unpunished betrayal that lies at the center of the story. There is even a central cliché, never explicitly stated but implicit in the book's arch, that men follow sex and women follow their hearts.

Then there is Dillard's problem (as pointed out by a NYTimes reviewer) of not restricting herself to words that readers learned in high school. Dillard does indeed use big words, although I'm not sure what that really means since they all occupy the same space in the dictionary. "Undiscovered" perhaps describes them better, and Dillard shows us just what wondrous treasures these words can be.

Toby and Lou Maytree meet, fall in love, and marry in post-war Cape Cod.

The second half of the novel shows them drifting apart.

Much of Dillard's prose is indeed lovely, yet the tone of the book feels rather cool and aloof.

The characters seem to be kept at a distance, almost like silhouettes.

I truly desired more depth and feeling.

This approach might work better in poetry, but I don't believe it suits this novel, despite the fact that other readers have highly praised it.

I adored Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, so I wonder if she writes better nonfiction.

I didn't dislike this novel. I simply wanted more substance.

Perhaps if the characters had been developed more fully and the story had delved deeper into their emotions and relationships, it would have been a more satisfying read for me.

Nevertheless, I can still appreciate the beauty of Dillard's writing and the unique atmosphere she creates in the novel.

It's just that my expectations were a bit higher, given my love for her other work.

Overall, it's a novel that has its strengths but also leaves room for improvement in my opinion.

Is Annie Dillard a philosopher? A poet? A naturalist? Or a storyteller? It's truly a challenge to decide based solely on the reading of her latest novel, The Maytrees. Among those four categories, her storytelling appears to be the least impressive, seemingly just a means for her to showcase her other talents.

The novel is presented as a love story, the romantic journey of Lou and Toby Maytree. The dialogue is scarce, almost nonexistent. Instead, we are invited to share the inner musings of the poet Toby and the quiet Lou as they spend their entire adult lives trying to understand love, the brevity of life, and the big questions: How do we make our short moments meaningful? What are we supposed to do? Does love come as a gift or is it an act of will?

I could follow some of the philosophical strands in the story, but I constantly felt that I wasn't grasping enough to fully comprehend it. Is beauty sufficient? What happens to our store of knowledge and experience when we die? I was left dissatisfied when the main characters didn't reach any final conclusions. The threads of thought seemed to be left hanging, not woven together, leaving me with a big question mark at the end.

The storyline wasn't captivating, the characters weren't fully developed, and the philosophy was complex and mysterious. So what made me keep reading this story?

I guess in the end it was the love of words that compelled me. Because although Annie may lack as a storyteller, she more than makes up for it as a wordsmith. Her descriptions of the Cape Cod beach, the flora, the fauna, the night sky, the dunes - they paint a multi-layered masterpiece of beauty, stroke by stroke. She has an unusual way of using words, almost poetically, which required me to read slowly and pay close attention.

I might read her almost classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek because I know it contains her thoughts on nature, where she truly shines as a writer. But another novel? Probably not.

The quotes that stood out to me:

Of Lou, the quiet woman:

"After their first year or so, Lou's beauty no longer surprised him. He never stopped looking, because her face was his eyes' home."

"Her mental energy and endurance matched his. She neither competed nor rebelled. Her freedom strengthened him, as did her immeasurable reserve."

Of Maytree, the poet:

"He endorsed Edwin Arlington Robinson's view that anthologies preserve poems by pickling their corpses."

Other:

"What gave adults the cheer to tolerate their hypocrisy? Even his mother praised generosity and hoarded; she preached industry and barely worked. Perhaps every generation passes to the next, to hand down to yet more children, an untouched trunk of virtues. The adults describe the trunk's contents to the young and never open it."

On beauty:

"In her last years Lou puzzled over beauty....She never knew what to make of it. Certainly nothing in Darwin, in chemical evolution, in optics or psychology or even cognitive anthropology gave it a shot. (snip) Philosophy...had trivialized itself right out of the ballpark. Nothing rose to plug the gap, to address what some called 'ultimate concerns' unless you count the arts, the arts that lacked both epistemological methods and accountability..."

This last quote makes me truly grateful for the gift of faith. My faith "plugs the gap" and although some might call it simplistic, I'm thankful that it saves me from the tortured mental gymnastics that must exhaust great minds without faith. Keep me simple.

Annie Dillard is undoubtedly the finest living creative non-fiction writer. Her talent lies in her unique ability to express common experiences and abstract emotions in words, with a sentence structure and beauty that is truly unrivaled. To prove this, one need only pick up An American Childhood or Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. These books, which are about everyday experiences, are made wondrous by Dillard's pen. Over the years, I have devoured every nonfiction book she has written.

However, the question remains: can she write fiction? The Maytrees is her second fictional attempt after The Living and the only novel of hers that I have read. It chronicles the 50-year relationship of a couple living on Cape Cod and delves into the hows and whys of love. The couple has a child, the man leaves with another woman, the other woman dies, and the man returns. The plot, while not revolutionary, does have its charms.

On the one hand, I did like the book. The description of Provincetown is enchanting, and Dillard does what she does best: she dissects small moments and thoughts, and gives voice to feelings that we have never been able to express. Her sentences are as beautiful as ever, and the story has the feel of a long poem.

On the other hand, it is clear that fiction is not Dillard's forte. The main problem I had was simply understanding the story. There is much more emphasis on how things are happening rather than what is happening. I had to read many passages twice just to understand the logistics of the events, and I don't think Dillard intended for it to be so confusing. There were also several inconsistencies in the numbers (for example, the main character's age is incorrect in several places, which immediately disrupts the reality of the world she has created) and several passages that didn't make sense for hundreds of pages (one passage in the first ten pages makes you think that a character is murdered, when in fact she dies of old age 200 pages later). These confusing elements did not seem to be there deliberately.

In conclusion, if you are an Annie Dillard enthusiast, The Maytrees is worth reading for the sake of her beautiful sentences and her descriptions of the New England coast. However, if you haven't read much of Dillard's work, I would recommend skipping this novel and opting for one of her nonfiction books instead. While The Maytrees is not unenjoyable, it does show that Dillard is much more adept at exploring our own world than at creating a fictional one.

I got myself in a snit over the review in the NY Times Book Review and sent the editor the following:

To the Editor:

Certainly Annie Dillard’s new novel, The Maytrees, deserved a more perceptive — indeed, a more proficient — reader than Ms. Reed (July 29). One wonders if she has ever considered the punning irony of her name, as she managed to stumble upon the key sentences of the novel under review, failed to recognize their import, and then admitted in print to being unable to parse them.

“Then there are passages that not even the O.E.D. could help me with,” says Ms. Reed, quoting: “Falling in love, like having a baby, rubs against the current of our lives: separation, loss, and death. That is the joy of them.” Ms. Dillard’s novel explores these “against the current” forces of romantic and parental love on level after level. An astute reader would have understood that the child of the titular couple would have “alewife thoughts” — another phrase Ms. Reed claimed not to understand — as alewives swim “against the current” to “fall in love” and “have babies.” That such sentences and phrases were salient enough for even Ms. Reed to notice them shows how powerful and perfectly chosen all of Ms. Dillard’s words actually are.

I suggest Ms. Reed spend a bit more time with her trusty dictionaries and The Maytrees. If she starts right at the title, she may find just how deftly and deeply the book is constructed — how under-written. Maytree is, of course, a pun on the Sanskrit word maitri, meaning an abiding loving-kindness without attachment. It is also a common name for the hawthorn tree, suggesting another great American writer who explored themes of love and its dilemmas in New England communities. This shows that the novel is filled with hidden meanings and layers that require a more in-depth and thoughtful reading. Ms. Reed's review seems to have missed these important aspects, which is a great pity. Maybe with more time and effort, she can appreciate the true beauty and complexity of The Maytrees.