HomeGroupsTalkMoreZeitgeist
Search Site
This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

Loading...

The Maytrees: A Novel (2007)

by Annie Dillard

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
1,2465315,404 (3.48)70
Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. Hands-off, he hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems. Dillard traces the Maytrees' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. Lou takes up painting. When their son Pete appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. These people are all loving, and ironic. As Dillard intimately depicts nature's vastness and nearness, she presents willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love.--From publisher description.… (more)
Loading...

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

No current Talk conversations about this book.

» See also 70 mentions

English (51)  French (1)  Romanian (1)  All languages (53)
Showing 1-5 of 51 (next | show all)
Annie Dillard is an acquired taste, and I thought that I had acquired it. I started [Pilgrim at Tinker Creek] many years ago, and couldn't get into it. Then I picked it up again a few years ago, and virtually drowned in it. I read [An American Childhood] with great pleasure. When I started [The Maytrees] late last year and wasn't pulled in, I decided I needed to wait until life was quieter, or my mood was, or something. I re-started it a few weeks ago, and was ripping right along until I hit a snag in the plot line that made me want to throw things. I put it aside, to deliberate whether I wanted to continue. Waffled. Read a few more chapters. Almost decided to give it up. Read other LT reviews. Counted the pages left. Decided by god to finish the thing. So I did.
As another LT'er wrote here, it works best as a book-length poem, rather than a novel. There is amazing imagery here. And insight into the human heart. But there are many many sentences that just don't say anything I can grasp. Syntax to Dillard is a plaything, and sometimes she breaks a window with it. If you blink your eyes, you'll miss the story. I want story. I closed the book dissatisfied with both the author and myself. I suspect I may one day revisit this novel. A second reading might be just what it needs.
Read and reviewed in 2009 ( )
  laytonwoman3rd | Mar 28, 2024 |
Incandescent story of a marriage. ( )
  jemisonreads | Jan 22, 2024 |
A work of fiction labeled a novel, but I find no plot or storyline that makes the reader think of a regular novel. I believe reviews by Kendall and Alicia on Goodreads do a fairly good description of how Ms. Dillard weaves observations, descriptions, dialog, philosophy, nature, poetry, and so much more into a book that that really defies description. This book will take time to read, digest, and revisit often to truly sink in. ( )
  wvlibrarydude | Jan 14, 2024 |
This is a multigenerational saga about the Maytree family, and is short (under 300 pages) considering it covers such a long time span. Dillard’s writing is beautifully poetic, and her descriptions of place are easily pictured, especially the scenes of sea, shore, swamps, sky, and stars. In one part, she captures a mother’s nostalgia for when her son was a young child, and the bond between the two is wonderfully portrayed. I loved the writing. If I were just rating this based on how it is written, it would be 5 stars.

Unfortunately, the storyline did not quite work for me. A man and woman fall in love, marry, and have a child. The man is a part-time poet. They live in Cape Cod and frequently interact with the Bohemian community of artists who live there. So far, so good. The issue is that it is difficult to understand their motivations. What happened to make their marriage fall apart? How is the wife able to get beyond her husband’s betrayal? She seems to take everything in stride and move forward as if nothing had happened. We are never privy to reasons for their actions. For a beautifully written book, I would expect it to be an emotional read, but I felt disconnected from the characters. I loved the writing but did not feel much for the characters. ( )
  Castlelass | Jan 24, 2023 |
read with WORDIES - may have been last book I read w them before moving to the Met ( )
  Overgaard | Jan 14, 2022 |
Showing 1-5 of 51 (next | show all)
Annie Dillard has always been at her best when considering death; the contemplation of mortality gives her writing an extraordinarily fierce and burnished quality. Her central, crucial question remains that posed in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: "What was it, exactly - or even roughly - that we people are meant to be doing here? Or, how best to use one's short time?"
added by eereed | editThe Guardian, Olivia Laing (Dec 8, 2007)
 
Ultimately, their story wins out and there is not the faintest sound of a wheel squeaking. In two beautifully told death scenes, Dillard has managed to achieve what Chekhov did with death in “The Bishop.” He “takes the mystery out of dying, makes it almost an ordinary occurrence,” Foote wrote to Percy. “And in the course of doing it, makes dying more of a mystery than ever.” 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.”
added by eereed | editNew York Times, Julia Reed (Jul 29, 2007)
 
You have to be wise to write in this kind of shorthand. You have to know something about what words can and cannot do. "Love so sprang at her," she writes of Lou, "she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again." It takes depth and width of experience to write lean and still drag your readers under the surface of their own awareness to that place where it's all vaguely familiar and, yes, universal.
 
Annie Dillard's books are like comets, like celestial events that remind us that the reality we inhabit is itself a celestial event, the business of eons and galaxies, however persistently we mistake its local manifestations for mere dust, mere sea, mere self, mere thought. The beauty and obsession of her work are always the integration of being, at the grandest scales of our knowledge of it, with the intimate and momentary sense of life lived.

The Maytrees is about wonder -- in the terms of this novel, life's one truth. It is wonder indeed that is invoked here, vast and elusive and inexhaustible and intimate and timeless. There is a resolute this-worldliness that startles the reader again and again with recognition. How much we overlook! What a world this is, after all, and how profound on its own terms.
 
For Dillard, a sense of exile seems always to accompany intimations of the holy, leaving her to ask, in many different ways, how time can be redeemed or restored, how the broken can be made whole.
 

Belongs to Publisher Series

You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Canonical title
Original title
Alternative titles
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Related movies
Epigraph
Dedication
For C. R. Clevidence
First words
The Maytrees were young long ago.
Quotations
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Original language
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (2)

Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. Hands-off, he hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems. Dillard traces the Maytrees' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. Lou takes up painting. When their son Pete appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. These people are all loving, and ironic. As Dillard intimately depicts nature's vastness and nearness, she presents willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love.--From publisher description.

No library descriptions found.

Book description
Haiku summary

Current Discussions

None

Popular covers

Quick Links

Rating

Average: (3.48)
0.5 1
1 12
1.5 2
2 24
2.5 5
3 49
3.5 17
4 73
4.5 8
5 36

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

 

About | Contact | Privacy/Terms | Help/FAQs | Blog | Store | APIs | TinyCat | Legacy Libraries | Early Reviewers | Common Knowledge | 203,227,690 books! | Top bar: Always visible