Anyone can be a nihilist these days.

I say this because so many writers who probably think of themselves as original really follow some ideology and/or literary trend that makes anyone of them pretty much like the other. Anyone can be a nihilist these days.

Dillard is different. She seems to follow an inward path in which she searches for some truth--or Truth--on an emotional and spiritual landscape that defies ideology. In many of her works, she begins with the particular and then, just when I can't stand one more detail, soars into the universal, leaving my heart shattered in a way that forces me to consider some concept anew, to see and feel what I should have felt and seen before but didn't.

I can't put my hands on For the Time Being--I've wandered over to every book shelf with no luck--so I'll have to do this from memory and hope I get the details right. The first short essay is a perfect example of my last point. Dillard starts by describing some medical book she's looking at that has pictures and descriptions of deformed children. Two or three paragraphs into the essay as she goes into detail about the chicken children, I ask myself, "To what point?" Ah, but here it is, she seems to say at the exact moment when I am ready to give up on her, not by telling me what the point is but by asking a simple question: "Felt like clucking lately?"

Yes, Annie, I want to say. I have. For I too am deformed.

Then she goes on to explain how fortunate the children's mothers are because they can carry their children in a basket wherever they go, and the children can never leave them. Even those horribly deformed children, she lets us know, need love and are loved. So we in our own emotional or spiritual deformity, our own chicken state, need love and are loved. What a relief.

In her latest novel, The Maytrees, she does the same thing--move from a particular couple who fall in love--to the universal.

In the beginning of this novel, Dillard enthralled me with the poetry of her work. About a forth of the way into it, I found myself asking whether it had a plot. I turned to the back and read from 1/3 of the way almost to the end . I didn't like a particular plot twist that took the breath right out of me I gasped so hard, yet Dillard's writing, the very beauty of her characters and of her poetry, drove me back to the front, where I began to read forward again. I couldn't let this story of a man and woman deeply in love and seemingly meant for each other let me go. In the end, they are flawed, as we all are. Fortunately, Dillard lets us see that those flaws don't deprive us of love or of loving. What I've written here is vague because the novel itself is like gossamer--to much analysis ruins it, and I don't want to give the story (it does have one) away. The most important point she makes, though, is the universality of each particular love, a love that overcomes even our own mistakes and the flaws that we carry like rocks through our lives.

http://www.anniedillard.com/