Shifting hearts, shifting sands
John de Falbe THE MAYTREES by Annie Dillard Hesperus, £12.99, pp. 185, ISBN 9781843917106 £1039 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Aman of about 60 who had read the American edition of this novel — it was published there a couple of months ago — told me lately that it was a 'grown-up book'. Among other things, I take him to mean that besides recognising the difficulties of love, it embraces them; and that love is not the exclusive domain of the young and frisky.
Toby Maytree is a poet who lives by the beach on Cape Cod. He 'hauls houses' for a living, but he has an insatiably inquisitive mind: 'He pitched into the world for plunder, probed it with torches, filled his arms and brain with pieces botched — to what end? Every fact was a rune.' Lou speaks `three languages and held her tongue in all of them'. They fall in love — he loves her 'immeasurable reserve'— and get married. 'She shipwrecked on the sheets. She surfaced like a dynamited bass ... All her life the thought of his body made her blush.' They have a child.
But after 14 years of acknowledged happiness, Toby runs off to Maine with Deary, an older woman who lives not merely by, but often on, the beach: she sleeps wrapped in a sailcloth. Twenty years later, despite being aware that he had listened 'on edge, for years and in vain, to uncover where, in any anecdote's avalanche, dropped the flake she thought might interest him', he is still committed to her. But when she is terminally ill he injures himself and cannot look after her, so he brings her back to Lou to die. Lou growls as he begins to mumble thanks and he realises that 'he was treating her like a stranger who was helping him change a tire'. She has forgiven him and he allows himself to be forgiven. She can still think of him as 'chivalrous'. As they slip again into intimacy, without forfeiting individuality they gain in dignity. When he asks where the mirror is, she tells him, 'I took it down.' Took it down?' It wanted products.'
When seriously presented — and they are — the difficulties of these struggles and transformations are immense. Could people really be like this? We all know that truth can be stranger than fiction: it is one of the challenges of fiction to persuade us that lives really might be lived and experienced in other ways. The vividness of Dillard's initial portrayal of the Maytrees' intimacy makes the shiftings of their hearts all the more startling. She achieves it by using language that might irritate some readers as mannered, but it works because the images are taut and precise. The snatches of conversation are intensely in character, never slipping into the solipsism of Ondaatje, with whom she might be compared. The Maytrees' minds, their relationships with friends and their perceptions of the natural world — `the dunes' scimitar shadows' — seem new. While some readers may regard this newness as affectation, others, like the American gentleman and I, will be persuaded by its beauty into feeling, however briefly, that the transformations Dillard depicts could be comprehended.
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