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Annie Dillard has always been drawn to places and events where "eternity clips time." She is convinced, on the one hand, that we have been abandoned to time and its remorseless plowing under of all we know and love; and, on the other, that the world is shot through with glimpses of the "holy" or the "real." The tree with the lights in it from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) was an early and now famous example of such a glimpse—a backyard cedar which, one day, appeared "charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame … . It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance … lifted and struck." Like Emily Dickinson, Dillard has an acute interest in birth and death, convinced that at such moments the surface of time cracks open and reveals unseen depths. In For the Time Being (1999), for example, spending time in a maternity ward, Dillard memorably describes a hospital as "a hole in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both ways, in and out of time."
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Beauty and pain are often what wake the observer in her nonfiction work to the sense that there is more going on than immediately meets the eye. As she puts it in Holy the Firm (1977), beauty and pain drive the artist, "in flawed imitation of Christ on the cross," to create work which burns with an awareness of the holy, touching it almost in torment and attempting to "span the gap, from here to eternity, home." In her first novel The Living (1992), love and death awaken her characters, as in this description of two young lovers so overwhelmed with the intensity of their feelings that a sudden, crushing grief overtakes them. They feel themselves marooned in time, exiled from a hidden world they had stumbled on: "As it happened, each had never felt life's loneliness more keenly that at that moment, holding hands and singing. Each had never suffered, than at that moment, greater and more decimating loss. The strength of adult emotions was new to them. The purity and depth of their private, sourceless griefs overpowered them." For Dillard, a sense of exile seems always to accompany intimations of the holy, leaving her to ask, in many different ways, how time can be redeemed or restored, how the broken can be made whole.
These issues run under the surface of her second novel, The Maytrees, published last year and now issued in paperback. It focuses on the marriage of Lou and Toby Maytree. It is set in Cape Cod, the drama of their marriage, as Dillard puts it, "played out before the backdrop of fixed stars," "their sandspit … a naked strand between two immensities, both given to special effects." Lou is the central character—tall, silent, capable of great intensities of awareness—and we spend much of the novel tracking her consciousness. Maytree, which is what Lou calls Toby, is a poet, given to book-length efforts which allow him to display his analytical, often abstract talents. They are both great readers, their two lives lived out in the resonating company of books.
Maytree grew up in Provincetown, spending summers in a one-room board shack near the coast guard station where his father worked. Lou moved there with her mother as a girl, eventually inheriting an old beachside house. They meet and marry after the war, in the late 1940s, with the house and shack playing prominent roles in their life together. As in The Living, love lifts the two of them temporarily out of time: "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. That world was gone … . Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it." When they do return to matter and time, it is in the company of the other, both of them newly aware of the world through the charged presence of someone else: "Their awarenesses rode waves paired like outriggers. Maytree thought Plato wrong: physical senses and wordless realms neither diverge nor oppose; they meet as nearest neighbors in the darkness of personality and embrace." Love, Dillard writes, becomes for them "an epistemological tool"—a way of knowing, continually throwing up new bits of a world broader and stranger than either had imagined alone. Included in this is their son Petie, who, in a rapid sequence of paragraphs, is born and lives out fourteen years.
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