Back to the Maytrees

I have found myself saying this repeatedly over the last couple of years:

Thank God for Julia Reed.

She is the brightest, most down-to-earth journalist/reviewer/public speaker; I will unabashedly buy Vogue magazine now because they have figured this out, too. Actually, I had never read her work until two years ago when I heard her speak about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. She had recently settled in New Orleans, and her description of the place and people and circumstances was so alive and riveting that I became a devoted fan of hers right on the spot.

So today while reading book reviews in the NY Times I was so thrilled to come across her take on Annie Dillard's new book. Here is an excerpt - sorry for quoting so much in full, but she makes me laugh. Here she is talking about the quirky nature of Dillard's writing process:

"In both the writing and the miracle businesses, the problem arises when you can see how it’s being done, when you are conscious of wheels squeaking and neurons firing, trying their damnedest to “illuminate and inspire,” and Dillard can be especially susceptible. In her new novel, “The Maytrees,” a meditation on love set on Cape Cod from World War II to the present, there is some of the familiar straining, along with constant evidence of her energetic reading. The gang’s all here, including, but not remotely limited to: Diogenes, Tiresias, Plato and Aristotle; Blake and Kafka; Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Louis Stevenson; Vietnamese legend and prehistoric Aleuts; Wittgenstein, Galileo and, of course, Tolstoy. (When the subject is love, Levin must be summoned.)

She reads the dictionary, too. There are no mere ragamuffins in Dillard, only a “tatterdemalion”; the tone of a man’s calf muscle is, here, the “tonus.” It was heartening in a way to find that she had spelled “pauciloquy” wrong, but even in its correct form, the Oxford English Dictionary deems its usage “rare.” Rarer still is “epistomeliac” — I could find it nowhere but I did learn that an epistome is an appendage in front of the mouth in crustacea and certain insects.

Then there are the passages that not even the O.E.D. could help me with. “Falling in love, like having a baby, rubs against the current of our lives: separation, loss and death. That is the joy of them.” One character’s “alewife thoughts” include visions of himself “and others” who “roamed the world feeding or vaccinating people, palpating mastitis in zebus.” When Eudora Welty reviewed “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” in these pages, she quoted one passage and wrote, “I honestly do not know what she is talking about at such times.” This, too, is a relief. I flip through my galleys of “The Maytrees” and find a half-dozen red question marks I made in the margins, bewildered and slightly irritated, but in good company at least.

The good news is that in “The Maytrees,” despite the big words and the name-dropping, despite remnants of what Welty called the “receptivity so high-strung and high-minded” on display in “Pilgrim,” there is also good old straight narrative and prose that is often, yes, breathtakingly illuminative..."

Anyway, it is always nice to hear one's skepticism confirmed. Reed seemed to love the book, too, despite its quirkiness: See her full review: "A Natural History of Love"