Synopsis
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 Pete appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. These people are all loving, and ironic. Theirs is a simple and bold story.
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.
The New York Times Book Review - Julia Reed
The good news is that in The Maytrees, despite the big words and the name-dropping…there is also good old straight narrative and prose that is often, yes, breathtakingly illuminative. Most important, in the book's central couple, Lou and Toby Maytree, as well as their motley group of Cape Cod friends, she gives us actual characters. In The Writing Life, there is no one (if we don't count the endless dead writers) but a stunt pilot she flies with in the last chapter to break the monotony of the mind…There, the endless musings are all her own, but here they are in the mouths of other people—blessedly quirky, funny, interesting other people… They are not only enough to save the book—from the author herself, in a way—but they are also infused with such life that they make it a near great one.