THE MAYTREES by Annie Dillard

Toby Maytree is a poet in Cape Cod, but his poetry is pretty straightforward, compared to the writing in this novel.  Are all of Annie Dillard’s books like this?  Maytree’s wife is Lou, an artist and a woman of few words, and she eventually has a son named Petie.  Then everything changes, but I won’t go into that and spoil pretty much the entire plot.  The book flap describes the prose here as “spare,” but I think the People magazine review, which calls it “oblique,” is more accurate.  Non sequiturs frequently appear in otherwise normal paragraphs that I thought I understood until I realized that I didn’t.  I was constantly confused about the characters’ ages, for example.  On the plus side, I found many sentences that state succinctly an illuminating thought about life in general or describe a person or place perfectly.  For example, on page 24, we have this:  “Jane’s hair overwhelmed two barrettes and a rubber band.”  However, these gems just do not compensate for the obscure allusions, over-the-top vocabulary, and weird word usage, such as “every last man jack” on page 126.  What does that mean?  OK, I looked it up, and I gather it’s a common idiom, just not one that I was familiar with.  Now I am.