The Maytrees Review
This was cannibalized from the response to an email about The Maytrees...
Concerning Dillard's work, I loved Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek so much that there has been a bias of affection towards her even though, to be truthful, I find much of her work not to my taste (though I did love the great memoir An American Childhood, perhaps even more than Pilgrim's).
With her latest work, I wanted to like it so I'm sure that was part of it. It got better towards the last 1/3rd from a plot point-of-view, or maybe I just started caring about the characters more by then. I am surprised the book was a best seller as long as it was.
The book is primarily about a subject inexplicable: love. What it is. Friendship or passion or both. I also liked that the book is cryptic at times. I can't seem to get into more straight-ahead, workman-like prose like that of a Richard Russo or a Jon Hassler. (And yet someone as rich as William Vollmann ends up being too dark. Updike too highly sexed. There's no pleasing me.)
Many of the images in The Maytrees are very sharp, very poetic. It seems a good book for our hurried, rushed times because it feels so condensed, almost like a long poem writ into sentences. And once in awhile she'd have that stray philosophical reflection that I adore in novels. (Reminds me of Iris Murdoch - dense prose with philosophical musings about love.)From the point of view of pure STORY, however, it's mediocre.
I'm also very curious about Dillard, the last American eccentric, and wanted to see how she's doing on her spiritual journey to the extent one can discover that in someone's novel - as one philosopher remarked, the only way to avoid metaphysics is to say nothing. We bloggers are all "open books" as Amy's old blog was called.
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