The Living
Annie Dillard, 1992
HarperCollins
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060924119
Summary
Annie Dillard evokes the frontier generation of the 19th century in Washington state's Puget Sound. Focusing primarily on three men and the settlement of Whatcom, Dillard presents us with a brilliant array of characters, their optimism and charity in the face of hardship, as well as racism, brutality and greed.
We watch as the inexorable rise of civilization rushes in upon the settlement, changing the region, the lives and fortunes of those who live there. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 30, 1945
• Where—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., Hollins College
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize (1975); Academy Award for
Literature, American Academy of Arts & Letters; National
Endowment for the Arts Grant; New York Public LIbrary
Literary Lion; Guggenheim Foundation Grant.
• Currently—lives in New York City
Annie Dillard is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, best known for her narrative nonfiction. She has also published poetry, essays, literary criticism, autobiography, and fiction. She is married to the historical biographer Robert D. Richardson, Jr.
Dillard describes her childhood at length in An American Childhood. She is the oldest of three daughters, born to affluent parents who raised her in an environment that encouraged humor, creativity, and exploration. Her mother was a non-conformist and incredibly energetic. Her father taught her everything from plumbing to economics to the intricacies of the novel On The Road. Dillard's childhood was filled with days of piano and dance classes, rock and bug collecting, and devouring the books on the shelves of the public library. But there were also many troubles—like the horrors of war, which she often read about.
After graduating from high school, Dillard attended Hollins College (Hollins University since 1998), in Roanoke, Virginia, where she studied literature and creative writing. She married her writing teacher, the poet R. H. W. Dillard (her maiden name is Doak)—the person she says "taught her everything she knows" about writing. In 1968 she graduated with a Masters in English, after writing a 40-page thesis on Thoreau's Walden, which focused on the use of Walden Pond as "the central image and focal point for Thoreau's narrative movement between heaven and earth." The next couple of years after graduation Dillard spent painting and writing. During this time, she published several poems and short stories.
Dillard's family did not attend Presbyterian church but when she was a child she and her sister did. She also spent a few summers at a fundamentalist summer camp. During her rebellious teenage years, she quit church because of the "hypocrisy." When she told her minister, he gave her a stack of books by C. S. Lewis, which ended this rebellion. After her college years, Dillard became, as she says, "spiritually promiscuous," incorporating the ideas of many religious systems into her own religious understanding. Not only are there references to Christ and the Bible in her first prose book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but also to Judaism, Buddhism, Sufism, and even Eskimo spirituality. In the 1990s, Dillard converted to Roman Catholicism.
Writing
After a near-fatal bout of pneumonia in 1971, Dillard decided that she needed to experience life more fully and began work on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She spent four seasons living near Tinker Creek, a suburban area surrounded by forests, creeks, mountains, and myriad animal life. When she wasn't in the library, she spent her time outdoors, walking and camping. After living there for about a year, Dillard began to write about her experiences near the creek. She started by transposing notes from her twenty-plus-volume reading journal. It took her eight months to turn the notecards into the book. Towards the end of the eight months, she was so absorbed that she sometimes wrote for fifteen hours a day, cut off from society without interest in current events (like the Watergate scandal).
The finished book brought her a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 at the age of twenty-nine. Her other books in this vein include Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk, and For the Time Being. She has also written a memoir about growing up in Pittsburgh, An American Childhood, and two novels, The Living, and 2007's The Maytrees.
Dillard spent some years as a faculty member in the English department at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
The Living is an august celebration of human frenzy and endurance. Her living are hectically alive, her dead recur in furious memory. And Annie Dillard, sometimes by an apparent crabwise indirection but with utter thoroughness, proves herself a fine novelist.
Thomas Keneally - New York Times Book Review
The kind of book a reader sinks into completely.... The characters are so compelling, the setting so detailed, so convincing, so absolutely complete.... The Living is an extraordinary accomplishment, one of those rare occasions when the written word results through the magic and talent of the author in the creation of the whole world
Boston Sunday Globe
The Living is an impressive piece of fiction and a riveting hunk of history.... The many readers who have been drawn in the past to Dillard's work for its elegant and muscular use of language won't be disappointed in these pages.... She has given herself a landscape large enough to challenge her talents.
Los Angeles Times
Pulitzer Prize-winner Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974) turns her hand to fiction with this historical novel of the American Northwest in the late 19th century. Focusing on the settlement at Whatcom on Bellingham Bay (near Puget Sound), Dillard offers a compelling portrait of frontier life. The novel has a large and richly varied cast of characters, from the engaging frontiersman Clare Fishburn and Eastern socialite-turned-pioneer Minta Honer to the disturbed and violent Beal Obenchain and kleptomaniac Pearl Sharp. The Living is unflinching in its delineations of pioneer life at its worst and best—racism and brutality on the one hand and optimism and charity in adversity on the other. Dillard's view of "the living" in its many senses is a fine novel that is an essential purchase for all fiction collections. — Dean James, Houston Acad. of Medicine/Texas Medical Center Library.
Library Journal
The popular Pulitzer-winning Dillard (An American Childhood, 1987, The Writing Life, 1989, etc.) has come up with a novel at last—a panoramic and engrossing re-creation of 19th-century pioneer life in the Pacific Northwest—complete with gentlemanly gold miners, avuncular railroad speculators, misty-eyed sweethearts, assorted schemers and dreamers, and even a three-card- monte player or two. Ada and Rooney Fishburn were barely into their early 20s when they set off by covered wagon for the untamed western coastland just south of Canada. Youthful ignorance and optimism proved to be their greatest assets, though, as they arrived at Whatcom, a minuscule settlement in Bellingham Bay, and threw themselves into a lifelong battle against the physical hardship, grueling labor, and frequent tragedies of frontier life. With the help of other settlers and a tribe of friendly Lummi Indians, the Fishburns managed to survive—long enough to watch with amazement as gold, railroads, and real estate brought undreamed-of fortune and calamity to their isolated shore. By the time the two surviving Fishburn sons were grown, an ever-increasing influx of shopkeepers, politicians, and entrepreneurs arriving from the Midwest, the East Coast, and Europe had quickened the rhythms of the town sufficiently to send all of Whatcom's fortunes reeling. New personalities joined the fray, including John Ireland Sharp, the soul-searching school principal forever marked by the poverty he witnessed in New York City; Minta and June Randall, Baltimore heiresses who bet their hearts and their inheritances on this coastland; Johnny Lee, a Chinese railway worker whose younger brother was deliberately drowned; andbrooding, depraved Beal Obenchain, who toyed with his fellow settlers' psyches as a form of recreation. As usual in Dillard's work, sparkling prose and striking insights abound, though a tendency toward overdescription, plus a certain emotional distance from her many characters—who must regularly vacate the stage to let others have a turn—take some of the power out of her punch. Otherwise: a triumph of narrative skill and faithful research—headed for success.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Talk about the role of women in this story—especially the competing views by Eustace Honer and the Noosack chief, Kulshan Jim. Both feel the other culture mistreats its women. What do you make of the comparison?
2. Many of Dillard's characters are an eccentric bunch—but they are also richly drawn. Which ones do you have particular sympathy for—or find repellant—and why? In particular, talk about Ada and Rooney Fishburn: are they equipped for what faces them? John Ireland Sharp and his idealism? Minta and June Randall and the choices they make?
3. Death is ever present in this work. Discuss the ways in which Dillard uses the crab (pincers of death?) as a symbol of life's tenuous hold, death's constant presence.
4. The structure of this novel is interesting: Dillard covers the events at the beginning of the book in a breath-taking pace, and then revisits them. As a result, she has removed much of the suspense—readers know what happens. How does her unusual plot structure strike you? Why might she have written in this manner?
5. Consider the different cultures that bump up against each other. How do they impact one another—do they assimilate with or learn from each other...or remain untouched? In what way is this slice of frontier similar or different from the nation as a whole?
6. How does the influx of civilization—gold, the railroad, and real estate—affect Whatcom and its residents? In your view, are changes for the better or worse...or both?
7. Talk about how the dream of brotherhood is turned on its head with the brutal treatment of the socialists and unionists toward the Celestials and Terrestials.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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