"The Maytrees" provides family, forgiveness and a few odd phrases

"The Maytrees"

by Annie Dillard

HarperCollins, 207 pp., $24.95

Annie Dillard, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," is admired as much for her prose as for her stories. In "The Maytrees," her first novel since the Pacific Northwest pioneer historical saga "The Living," she tells an engaging, subtle tale, but one in which her sentences sometimes soar off into an empyrean so rarified that plot and characters are left behind.

In the mid-1940s, Toby Maytree, a young carpenter and poet, has spent the war at the San Francisco Office of War Information. He returns to his native Cape Cod, "that exposed and mineral sandspit," where artists and eccentrics front the wild Atlantic and resolutely turn their backs to the conventions of American life. In a beach shack, Toby reads and watches the stars, the tides, the seasons.

Lou Bigelow is a young woman of striking looks who has had a privileged life and now seems content to surrender her life to those same rhythms of nature. Inevitably, it seems, they fall in love. When he walks her to his home on the dunes, it seems to her that "the world of town vanished as if the wind tore it off." For his part, "without her he already felt like one of two pieces of electrical tape pulled apart."

They marry, have a son and live without a television or a car, no insurance or savings. If it sounds precarious, Dillard leaves no doubt that it is also idyllic: "After they married she learned to feel their skin as double-sided. They felt a pause. Theirs was too much feeling to push through the crack that led down to the dim world of time and stuff."

Lou's ecstatic sensuality is a mild example of the way Dillard's sentences can careen from literal to metaphorical in turns so sharp that the reader risks whiplash. The image of their "double-sided" skin beautifully echoes Toby's sense of himself as "one of two pieces of electrical tape." But then, "They felt a pause." Are we to understand that their life together proceeds in a parentheses, separate from "the dim world of time and stuff"? Perhaps. But what is "the crack"?

Whatever it might mean in the context of Lou's reverie, Toby will later fall through it — or is he pushed? In any case, he leaves Lou and their son, Petie, who has just suffered a broken leg, to move to Maine with their friend Deary. Their descent into the "world of time and stuff" comes fast, and Deary's business savvy and Toby's carpentry make them wealthy.

Meanwhile, Lou raises their son and learns to savor her independence. Decades later, more broken bones will bring Toby and Deary back to Lou. Anger, acceptance, forgiveness and love pulse through the narrative as forcefully as the tides.

Yet the tides can go still when Dillard offers another head-scratcher of a metaphor or an ellipsis as abrupt as a brick wall. Here is Petie, now a grown man, pondering his father's abandonment: "Years ago when he was a boy he tried to talk himself out of hating his father. It worked for a while, until the years' silences piled up." So far, so good. But then, "Now he was frying in crumbs. Helplessly he imagined those two there in Maine doing what." He is a fisherman, so maybe "frying in crumbs" figures the fisherman as his catch, breaded and fried. Maybe "doing what" suggests that his imagination won't dare elaborate on what they're doing.

As much as "The Maytrees" is about the Maytrees, it is also about language — language that is sometimes obtrusively showy, sometimes lyrically enthralling.

Richard Wakefield is the author of the poetry collection "East of Early Winters" (The University of Evansville Press/Richard Wilbur Poetry Series). He lives in Federal Way and teaches at Tacoma Community College.