Shakespeare is said to have had a vocabulary of close to 35,000 words. Most of us have less than a seventh of that knowledge, and despite the accessibility of search engines, even fewer work to expand their lexicons.
At Bowdoin, we have the Oxford English Dictionary at our fingertips but are too lazy to look up the single unknown word in a 30?word Emily Dickinson poem. (Incidentally, this is the only infraction that has compelled my favorite professor of English to throw his class out, and though I was not in the class myself, I know what the word was [gambrel] and have even looked it up [it has to do with sloping roofs].)
Despite his frequent admonishments, it is rare that I flag an unknown word for investigation. Even more unlikely is making a deliberate trip to look it up.
But the unknown words in "The Maytrees," Annie Dillard's most recent novel, appear with such unpredictability that there is a compulsory reach for the dictionary. What is more, this act is not one of frustration; the vocabulary in "The Maytrees" is so odd, it's enticing.
Among the linguistic discoveries I made were lagniappe (a small present given by a store to somebody who has just purchased something); pauciloquy (the economy of speech); fusty (which basically means musty); and spicule (a small, hard, needle-shaped part, especially any of the calcium or silicon containing supporting parts of certain invertebrates such as sponges and corals; a slender column of relatively cool high density gas that rapidly erupts from the solar chromosphere and then falls back). The latter is especially wonderful because the two definitions could hardly have a more tenuous connection.
The occurrence of words such as these is sporadic, which diffuses any pomposity and confirms them to be linguistic slivers of particular interest. These words are not drowned out by similarly illegible prose, and thus it is a point of notice when they crop up.
The Maytrees of the title are oddities in themselves.
Lou and Maytree live in Provincetown, Mass. He is a kind of poet and she is Lou, college-educated and something of a majestic figure for Maytree. They are surrounded by an odd bunch. Reevadare goes through husbands like chocolates, Deary sleeps in the dunes, and Cornelius and his much younger wife live contentedly in different houses.
The portrait Dillard paints has the crunch of New England eccentricity. These are not society Brahmins; they are the ones who are left when the summer people have gone. Life is very much about living, not about making a profit or getting ahead.
The tranquility of the portrait is somewhat disrupted by Maytree's departure from Lou and their son Petie for Deary. Rather than reconstructing a scene of upheaval, however, as Dillard reveals Lou's steady adjustment, she expresses no bitter resignation. Their history is not erased by his abandonment of her, and a connection between them remains despite the absence of contact for more than 20 years.
The unusual is a continuous theme throughout this narrative. There is a quality to it that is far-fetched. At times it is as if there is a layer of gauze wrapped around the events in this story; the kind of haze that emanates off the beach in the summer or the cool detachment produced by a very light fog.
But Dillard picks up on the endurance of feeling despite the presence of extenuating circumstances. Actions lack distinct boundaries, it turns out, the tendrils of shared experience and crossovers of love run like mycelium between the Maytrees, sustaining them through age and distance.