2 of 3
All of this takes place in sixty-page prologue. Parts 1, 2, and 3 follow, with a brief epilogue. If we let the structure of the novel do its intended work, we see very quickly what its real issues are. In part 1, the marriage breaks. After 14 years, Maytree abruptly runs off with a free-spirited family friend, Deary, beginning what the novel calls the couple's "twenty middle years." Lou suffers. In an image Dillard has used in previous books to talk about the soul's line cast out to a seemingly absent God, she writes that Lou "found herself holding one end of a love. She reeled out love's long line alone; it did not catch." She is literally abandoned into time, but with the aching knowledge of something more than its unending daily erosions. Love has taught her that. She falls apart, but then she gradually begins to "let go" of the sense that the world centers on her. Inch by inch, for two decades, she gets "clean" of that sense of self and, gradually, great "distances opened as she opened." The world, visible in something like its holy intensity, rushes in as the bitter reality of exile loosens the boundaries of the self. Letting go is a response to the holy's coming and going that Dillard has frequently investigated, but Lou's version is as powerful a realization as she has ever written.
The twenty years apart pass in what seems a few pages, and part 2 describes what brings Lou and Maytree, still in love, back together. Deary's health deteriorates—in her late sixties, a leaking mitral valve brings her to congestive heart failure—and Maytree tends her. Though he never really loved her, he has honored the commitment running away with her represented, comparing it to wrapping his hands around oars on a cold sea, icing them fast, and continuing to row. Carrying her through the snow to a doctor's appointment, he slips, tosses her to safety in a snow bank, and breaks both arms, his ribs, wrist, and thumb: "His X-rays looked like the Tungsta event, the Siberian forest after a meteorite hit." Unable to care for himself or Deary, he returns to Lou, depositing Deary at the house and walking the beach at night to present himself at the shack. Lou agrees to help and, in part 3, they nurse Deary through the eight weeks of her dying, ministering to her as she "chars and buckles like a leaf." This is unexpected and deeply affecting, and it gives Dillard a way of exploring the "moral stance" that Lou had crafted out of her charged abandonment, an awareness not just of the world's brilliant intensities but of human dignity as well.
Maytree expects to leave after Deary's death, but he finds himself back in the original relationship, swept along by Lou's growth, "her immense solitude so gloriously … broached" by this series of events. More years pass. Together, the two of them, once opened to the holy and the real and then exiled from it, find themselves charged once again with restoring the world by taking a small part of it into their shared, knowing embrace: "They enfolded each other and looked over each other's shoulders at the world's wreck where all shattered, at bareness they held at bay. Or they cradled the world between them like a mortally sick child, loving it and not telling it all they knew."
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