All you need is love

After all those years writing about nature, Dillard knows how to create Eden on the page: life in Provincetown, a shack on the dunes, a group of friends bohemian enough to prioritize friendship and, heaven help us, love at first sight. Toby courts Lou; she's 23, looks like Ingrid Bergman; he's a 30-year-old poet in love with the sea. "They held themselves alert only in those few million cells where they touched," Dillard writes. Between them, they read around 300 books a year. "He read for facts, she for transport." What else do you need to know?

You need to know what happens to them. And you fear the worst. Why? Because nothing that good ever lasts. This is why so many cleave to art over faith. And yet, in "The Maytrees," Dillard tries to write herself into believing that literature is less important than living. Lou "once hoped to acquire what Pico della Mirandola had: Keats called it 'knowledge enormous.' [He] had settled for knowledge slim.... Whether his work lasted was less crucial now than whether [his grandson] Manny would straddle his shins a little while longer."

This is a novel about finding new levels of love. Absence does, it turns out, make the heart grow fonder. Dillard, as she did in "The Living," plays time like a slightly drunken harmonica player. "Twice a day behind their house," she writes, "the tide boarded the sand. Four times a year the seasons flopped over. Clams live like this, but without so much reading." Nothing linear about it.

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.

"The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it," Dillard wrote in "An American Childhood." "The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world -- if only from time to time." By this emphatic standard, "The Maytrees" is an exquisite book. As in "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," Dillard has shown us something of the exterior life, of the world around us and, in the process, convinced us that it is indeed beautiful to be alive -- even, it turns out, in love.

--

susan.reynolds@latimes.com