The Maytrees was published by HarperCollins in 2007 and is Dillard’s second and final novel — a love story compressed into 216 pages that spans fifty years. Toby and Lou Maytree meet in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the late 1940s: two intelligent, solitary people drawn together by physical passion and intellectual affinity. They marry, have a son, build a life among the artists and drifters of the Cape’s tip — and then, after twenty years, Toby leaves Lou for her best friend. Twenty more years later, he returns, dying, and Lou takes him in.
The Novel
The plot summary sounds like melodrama, but the telling is anything but. Dillard’s prose in The Maytrees is so compressed, so stripped of unnecessary detail, that the novel reads almost like poetry — each sentence doing the work of a paragraph, each chapter covering what another novelist would take fifty pages to traverse.
The Provincetown setting is rendered with the naturalist’s precision Dillard brings to every landscape: the dunes, the light, the tides, the architecture of fish shacks and converted whaling houses. Place is not merely setting but character — the Cape shapes who these people are and how they live.
The novel’s emotional center is not the betrayal but the return — Lou’s decision to care for the dying man who abandoned her. This is not presented as saintliness or weakness but as a choice made by a strong woman who has lived alone for twenty years and discovered that solitude has its own integrity. Taking Toby back does not cancel the betrayal; it simply acknowledges that love persists beyond justice.
Style
The prose is the sparest Dillard has ever written — sparser than the poetry, sparser than Holy the Firm. Sentences are sometimes only three or four words. Paragraphs sometimes only one sentence. The effect is of enormous events rendered in minimum space — like a Japanese ink painting where a single brushstroke suggests an entire landscape.
This compression is deliberate and philosophical: Dillard is arguing (through method, not statement) that the essential can be separated from the incidental, that a fifty-year marriage can be captured in 216 pages if you attend to what matters and ruthlessly discard what doesn’t.
Collecting The Maytrees
First edition (HarperCollins, New York, 2007): Cloth binding with dust jacket.
Identification points:
- HarperCollins imprint
- “First Edition” with number line
- 216 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $30–$100.
Signed copies: $100–$250. Dillard promoted the book at publication.
As Dillard’s final novel (she has published little since), it has the authority of a last statement — the mature vision of a writer who spent thirty years perfecting the art of compression.