EVERY so often, a novel comes along that describes a relationship with such thoroughness that you almost feel better about love. Maybe, just maybe, it's a worthy use of our time alive. Annie Dillard's "The Maytrees" is such a novel. It is also a reservoir of oceanic language, thrilling and sophisticated assumptions of reader intelligence and elegantly lean descriptive detail.
Best known as a nature writer and essayist, Dillard has published a dozen books in her 33-year career, but "The Maytrees" is only her second novel. Her first, "The Living" (1992), followed the Fishburn family, pioneer settlers on the coast of Washington, through three generations and across the country. Although "The Living" is a historical novel, Dillard never bowed to the god of plot or the patron saint of chronology -- whole lives passed parenthetically and vistas opened up without warning, as if fate existed and the Fishburns were following its trail.
Dillard is unconventional, despite having won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1974 book "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." In "The Writing Life" (1989), she worried that she was too philosophical, that her work was not immediate enough. "I was too far removed from the world," she wrote. "My work was too obscure, too symbolic, too intellectual. It was not available to people. Recently I had published a complex narrative essay about a moth's flying into a candle, which no one had understood but a Yale critic, and he had understood it exactly."
It's true that "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" is a thicket of brilliance; there's only so much a person can digest in a single burst. It hurts to have your consciousness stretched, and Dillard is a relentless advocate of seeing. But she did a funny thing in that book. She discovered a way to meld the personal with the universal in one dispassionate voice. Small human drama does not interest her; even in her 1987 memoir, "An American Childhood," she kept one eye on the human horizon. But let an insect shed its wings on a fall day and you'd think the cosmos had shattered for the second Big Bang.
This same dispassion is all over "The Maytrees." Here, the story is about the love between two people, Toby and Lou Maytree, and it is fraught with desire, cultural norms, children, possessions, affairs and old age. Damned if it couldn't be anyone facing the same challenges, the same questions: What are we supposed to do with this short time on Earth? Does it matter if we're all going to die anyway? Is one kind of love better, purer than another? What good is art?
