I am a fan of Annie Dillard. I read her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek like some people eat dessert, thoroughly enjoying myself. And I laughed my way through her An American Childhood, brooded with her in Teaching a Stone to Talk, and learned from her in The Writing Life. So when her latest book, The Maytrees: A Novel, came out in paperback, I read it straight away.

The story is an unusual love story in that Dillard through her main characters, Maytree and Lou, ponders, probes and pokes at what is lasting love? It can’t just be biological (sexual) thrill because old people fall in love. Poets try to capture it, but all poets are meaningless until one experiences love. “Love so sprang on her [Lou], she honestly thought no one had ever looked at it. Where was it in literature? Someone must have written something” (31). Science fails to grasp lasting love, chalking it up to adrenaline. “Lasting love makes no scientific sense after the kids can hunt and gather… . That it [lasting love] was outside science’s lens did not mean it did not exist” (129-130). Like most lovers, “Lou and Maytree saw their love as unique. Of course they rarely fought; she rarely spoke. They both knew love itself as an epistemological tool.”

I found the book cumbersome to read in places and I freely admit that it could just be me. I am not in the same Northeast, Cape Cod culture in which the story happens. Also I admit Dillard used some words I have never read and didn’t know their meanings, but I kept reading anyway. Annie has an intriguing, artful way of using words and you feel like she is leaning over your shoulder as you read and at times says “Gotcha!” Reading on to experience these moments is the gravitational pull of the Annie Dillard adventure. Here is one describing Lou who went into a self-appointed solitude: “Lou hoped to scandalously live her own life. …She only wanted to hear herself think. …Maybe someday a thought or two would come. In the meantime she cleared the landing strip” (133). Another amazing two sentences: “Now she knew he woke. The room seemed to get smarter” (32).

Annie Dillard is 63 years old. She is at the leading edge of the Baby Boomers, many of whom are following her into the last 20 years or so of life. To have an artistic, accomplished author of her witty skill craft a story about love-growing-old is a gift to readers everywhere and of any age.

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