HOME / books: Reading between the lines.

Not Strictly PlatonicAnnie Dillard tells a love story.

By Daniel B. SmithPosted Thursday, June 28, 2007, at 12:38 PM ET

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Intimacy could not be unique to her and Maytree, this brief blending, this blind sea they entered together diving. His neck smelled as suntan does, his own oil heated, and his hair smelled the same but darker. He was still fresh from an outdoor shower. Awareness was a braided river. It slid down time in drops or torrents. Now she knew he woke. The room seemed to get smarter. His legs moved and their tonus was tight. Her legs were sawdust; they were a line of old rope shreds on sand. All her life the thought of his body made her blush.
—We should get up, Maytree said, and moor the dory. Tide's coming in.

That this is a description of the Maytrees' sex life suggests the purpose of Dillard's economical style. Some writers strip down their prose mainly in order to evoke a mood of bleakness or emotional detachment. Dillard strips down her prose because too much action or too much talking would distract from how her characters reflect on what happens and is said. Dillard's publisher is marketing The Maytrees as a love story. This is technically true but misleading. Like all of Dillard's work, the novel is a meditation. It is an attempt to understand how, with what consequences, and even why love works. "Love so sprang at her," Dillard writes of Lou, in the initial throes of her desire for Toby, "she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it."

But the novel's relatively simple boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-and-girl-reconnect plotline is a salutary force, a counterweight to the novel's philosophical impulses. Dillard was evidently aware that, by training her eye on the consciousnesses of two tirelessly reflective, frighteningly well-read people—people given to thoughts like, "Maybe lasting love is a rare evolutionary lagniappe"—she might be trying the patience of readers accustomed to more straightforward narratives, because she seems at times to apologize for her style. "Lou asked herself, yet again, What happens to people out here on the lower Cape? … From solid citizens they sublimed to limbless metaphysicians." Yet aside from this being almost comically reductive—like Joyce chalking up his prose style to the Dublin air—it isn't necessary. The Maytrees is deeply meditative, but it always returns from its musings to the palpable facts of its characters' lives. Toward the end of the book, Toby wonders, "Was it reasonable to love the good and good to love the reasonable?" Then he drives to the garage to rotate his tires.

This isn't new of Dillard, not entirely. It is characteristic of her to juxtapose high thought and mundane act; she delights in the fact that a person can strive for universal truths one moment and haggle with a mechanic the next. The difference between her nonfiction books and The Maytrees is that, in the former, she has nothing to pull herself back to earth but her good judgment, which sometimes fails. And when she does return, it is often to mute rocks and bugs and her own solitary investigations of the natural world. In The Maytrees, Dillard is beholden to Toby and Lou and the simple arc of their lives playing out "before the backdrop of fixed stars." If the story of love lost and regained allows her to plumb the mysteries of attraction, it also keeps her feet firmly planted on the ground.