Executive Times
		2007 Book Reviews
		The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
Rating:			****
		(Highly Recommended)
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	Abiding Packed with poetic language and lingering imagery, Annie Dillard’s latest novel, The Maytrees will bring great pleasure to most readers. Love and longing, closeness and distance, mark decades of relationships that are marked by abiding loyalty. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 26-29: There in her garden under a locust, Reevadare told Lou her favorite part of marriage. —It’s a marvelous way to get to know someone! Reevadare wore a Gibson girl pouf that perhaps also filled her glass-cherry-piled hat. Lou asked point-blank, Can love last? (Rural people get to philosophizing, and will say anything.) —Oh, darling! No, not that heart-thumping passion. Give that eighteen months. But it’s replaced by something even better. Lou waited. —Lovers! How they prized Reevadare, upright people did. She fought their battles for them like a mercenary. —Why do people fret about such a simply marvelous thing as love? After a bout with Reevadare, her friends’ gargoyle scruples dropped from their shoulders and did not climb back for hours. Maybe she would even go to hell for them! She was already a southerner, from Virginia or Oklahoma or Mississippi or one of those. That night on her pinching bench Reevadare offered Lou advice. With many killing rings she pressed Lou’s hand and said, Keep your women friends, darling. Men come and go. It was only lunatic here in part, Lou thought, looking around. Among their friends were people who wrote, people who painted, people who taught, people who carved or welded sculptures, and poets barefoot, lefty, and educated to a feather edge. They wore Greek fishermen’s caps, frayed shirts, and huaraches. J. Edgar Hoover warned Congress about their ilk in 1947, noting Communist plans “to infiltrate the so-called intellectual and creative fields.” They talked: Did the United States have a culture—apart from making money? Could a moving picture be a work of art? Among the older generation of their friends, almost no one remained a party member; Stalin’s purges purged them. Did existence precede essence? Did somebody say martini? Lou stayed late. South above town the Milky Way tangled Mars in its slack nets. Laughing, locust leaflets in her face, Deary related to Lou every least event from this very party they had not left. With Maytree and Cornelius, Lou emptied ashtrays and tossed Dixie cups. Reevadare, Sooner Roy, and Deary switched to whisky sours. Lou walked home by the water, at stars’ level. She held her shoes and avoided trash. In the open, starlight was plenty of light. Of course Reevadare’s exotic life led her to think men came and went. No one knew what she and Maytree knew. The following noon, walking Commercial Street as everyone did many times a day, Lou saw Deary posing for a painting class on the beach by MacMillan Pier. Maytree recently told her that old Cornelius said of Deary, quoting someone about a Hollywood star, that she had curves in places where other women didn’t even have places. Lou watched the painting students. Lou knew that vagabond Deary tended to marry painters, inter alia. Her marital history rivaled Reevadare’s. Deary was the marrying kind. Between marriages she had boyfriends. Lou and Maytree both liked a recent suitor of Deary’s. That was articulate Slow Sykes, who wore green shoes and held down third base. A serious painter in oils, he also read good books. He always showed up for sunset drinks on May-trees’ beach, and acted out a new joke or two a day. Lou heard at once when, within two hours of Deary’s marrying him, the new groom motored from Fishermen’s Pier for their honeymoon cruise without her. Later Lou visited Deary’s cold-storage shed and saw by lamplight the letter this gentleman wrote Deary on linen bond. He apologized and sought divorce as kindly as possible. He noted in apparent misery that he had realized on the pier, for the second time on their one wedding day, how long it took a woman to change clothes. Deary found that sensible, and told the story on herself, laughing helplessly and anew each time. She was, Cornelius said, easily amused. Before Lou knew her, Deary wed a New York painter who came to Provincetown every summer. Lou’s mother used to find him surly. He divorced her for a Boston orthopedic surgeon, and both seemed to cheer up. Then she married a sweet-talking Azorean fisherman, a dragger. Everyone knew the dragger’s family froze him out because Deary was not Catholic. He obviously missed his gregarious kin, just across town, so Deary sadly released him. One summer Lou returned from college to find Deary married to an old Rocky Mountain abstractionist who wore a gaucho’s rawhide hat. She saw his few clothes and many primed canvases in the cold-storage shed. There he told Lou he found Provincetown provincial. Later Deary, weeping, told Lou that he moved to a Greenwich Village studio and returned only once, bareheaded, to load his canvases on the bus. And once she married a Red Sock, a reliever who never came back from spring training. Standing on the road by the beach Lou studied the painting class. Alarmed, Lou saw the students en plein air ripple green and blue and cadmium yellow and red around Deary’s form in glare. She herself hoped to paint, soberly, when she got old. The more she saw of the Provincetown school, the more she favored grisailles. Keep a dictionary close at hand while reading The Maytrees, because chances are you’ll run across more than a word or two that will rouse your curiosity. Abiding love, though, that’s something that will keep you thinking long after you turn the final page of The Maytrees. Steve Hopkins, July 25, 2007
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	2007 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the August 2007 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Maytrees.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com