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by: Annie Dillard
List Price: $24.95Amazon.com's Price: $16.47 You Save: $8.48 (34%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780061239533
ISBN: 0061239534
Label: HarperCollins
Manufacturer: HarperCollins
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: June 01, 2007
Publisher: HarperCollins
Release Date: June 12, 2007
Sales Rank: 4927
Studio: HarperCollins
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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.
In spare, elegant prose, 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 Petie appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. But years later it is Deary who causes the town to talk.
In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts nature's vastness and nearness. She presents willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Annie Dillard's original body of work.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A Poetic Essay on Love
I have long considered Annie Dillard as one of the finest American essayists, right up there with E. B. White. Her description in TEACHING A STONE TO TALK of watching a total eclipse of the sun on a hilltop in Washington State is one of the most remarkable short pieces of writing I can think of, for its combination of everyday detail, scientific observation, and sheer awe at the smallness of man in the transcendental scale of the cosmos. Dillard's poetry, her awareness of the totality of the natural ... Read More
Rating:  - Deeply Beautiful
It's very hard to describe The Maytrees in a few sentences. What is this novel about? I suppose it is, as many others have said, a love story. But to my mind it is as much about love of place as it is about love of a spouse or of a family.
There's not much action in the conventional sense, so if you are looking for a good plot, I would skip this book. What it is, though, is incredibly, deeply lyrical. The language sings and whispers, and occasionally shouts. Reading The Maytrees ... Read More
Rating: - Almost Poetic
Written in stark, almost poetic prose, not a word wasted, not an adjective used if not necessary, not a single flight into fancy, this strange little book mirrors its two main characters, stoic New Englanders who meet, marry, have a great love affair, and go through the decades in different, often shockingly surprising, iterations.
I won't do a spoiler here, although really the book is much less plot-oriented than it is a visual piece, carefully placed before the reader with exquisitely ... Read More
Rating: - fine family redemption drama
Just after WW II ends in Provincetown on Cape Cod, wannabe thirtyish poet Toby Maytree and college student Lou Bigelow meet. Though an author, Toby struggles to get his tongue straight as he is unable to put together two coherent thoughts let alone sentences. Still she senses something deep inside his soul; they relish the dunes, fall in love and marry. A few years later they add a son Pete to their perfect family.
However, their idyllic life together ends when a cheating Toby leaves ... Read More
Rating:  - Don't bother
Forgot all about this most forgettable book, until today when Amazon sent me an email suggesting I'd be interested in reading it. What I haven't forgotten: what a dull, boring, overwritten, undermotivated novel it is, an unlovable love story with no love interest. The moral of the story: famous writers/thinkers produce their share of duds and get them published anyway.
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