The Living by Annie Dillard

First published: 1992

Type of plot: Historical realism

Time of work: 1855-1897

Locale: Various sites around Bellingham Bay, Washington

Principal Characters:

• Ada Fishburn, and
• Rooney Fishburn, a couple who set out from Council Bluffs, Missouri, with a wagon train to settle in Whatcom, Washington
• Clare Fishburn, their son, who grows up to be a possibly powerful political figure in Whatcom and who is the target of Beal Obenchain’s plot
• Minta Honer, and
• Eustace Honer, a couple from prominent Baltimore families who come to Washington to become farmers
• John Ireland Sharp, the grandson of an early settler, a devotee of philosophy and liberal causes
• Beal Obenchain, a cruel social outcast, murderer, and wild man

The Novel

Based in part on Annie Dillard’s experience of the northern Washington landscape as she lived there from 1975 to 1980, The Living recounts the early days of several settlements on Bellingham Bay from 1855 to 1897. The historical epic traces the fortunes and vicissitudes of three fictional families—the Fishburns, the Honers, and the Sharps—through several generations as they negotiate with the landscape, with the native peoples, with Chinese immigrants, with new waves of settlers, and with ever-changing economic fortunes.

The Living is divided into six long sections, each focusing on a major character, family, or event; the book also includes a brief afterword. The stories are told in third-person omniscient narration, with many flashbacks into the thoughts and events of characters’ pasts. The epic weaves a tapestry of pattern and variation in the struggles of these early settling families.

The book begins dramatically, with the arrival by boat of Ada and Rooney Fishburn and their two remaining children, Clare and Glee, in Whatcom. The landscape is desolate, wet, and primitive. The heavy evergreen growth seems oppressive; the native inhabitants, primarily of the Lummi tribe, seem strange and exotic. All customary values seem irrelevant in this new land, and Ada obsessively remembers the losses, especially of her small son, Charley, that she had to endure to settle here.

Eventually, the children thrive, and the Fishburns begin to learn the joys of Northwest life. They both respond to the landscape—most notably to towering, snowcapped Mt. Baker—and set out to conquer the land, clearing away with fervor the dense evergreen growth. The native inhabitants become inextricably linked to the daily lives of the Fishburns, participating in sharing their lore and mechanisms for survival with the new settlers. Clare, who is of the first generation of white settlers to be reared here, feels marked for a heroic life. This section ends with Rooney’s death by poison gas as he is digging a new well.

Book 2 recounts the formation of the personality of John Ireland Sharp, primarily through his early experiences. As a young man, he participates in a scouting expedition into the Cascade Mountains to seek a route for the Northern Pacific Railroad. During this expedition, the party discovers the evidence of racial hatred and torture: The staked body of a Skagit tribe boy who had been cruelly used by the Thompson tribe. John gets beaten up by Beal Obenchain in a random act of tyranny; ironically, he later is adopted into the Obenchain family when his own family drowns. He witnesses Beal’s senseless killing of a newly born calf and the exhilaration it brings the bully. John, who has learned to love socialist causes while working in New York City, in Whatcom witnesses xenophobia in action. He comes to seek the pristine inspiration of the sight of Mt. Baker and prefer it to the cruelty he experiences among humans. The town’s economic situation becomes precarious when the train terminus is set for Tacoma rather than Whatcom; there is an immediate financial slump.

In book 3, Whatcom shrivels in the economic depression. The widow Ada Fishburn moves with her son Clare to Goshen, a neighboring settlement, and there they meet Minta and Eustace Honer. Goshen is a thriving farming community where Clare, now a tall and joyful man, lends a hand with Kulshan Jim, of the Nooksack tribe, to help Eustace with clearing more of the land for farming. Ada remarries, and all goes well until there is an enormous logjam on the Nooksack River. All citizens, native and new settlers alike, set about to clear the jam, but Eustace is drowned in the effort. The vulnerability of life in this hard environment begins to affect young Hugh Honer, especially when his two young siblings die in a house fire after the rest of the family has left briefly to meet the Randalls, Minta’s visiting relatives. After the tragedy, Minta’s sister June remains in Goshen to be courted by Clare Fishburn, but the other Randalls return to familiar ways in Baltimore.

By the beginning of book 5, readers feel at home with the Northwest ways and the variety of people the land creates. In another vivid episode, Beal Obenchain performs the senseless and sadistic murder of Lee Chin simply because the victim is Chinese. Whatcom thrives because the Great Northern Railway proposes to have its western terminus there. Clare Fishburn returns and becomes a prosperous land speculator, and everyone believes in progress. Ironically, at the ceremony to honor the Canadians and their railroad, the citizens get involved in a petty water fight and lose the contract.

Beal Obenchain, at loose ends, decides (in the central plot event of the novel) that mere murder of the inferior does nothing to prove his own superiority. He lights upon a plan to humiliate someone: Beal will draw a name from a hat, and he will simply threaten to kill the person, with no intention of actually doing so. Thus, he will gain supreme power over that person’s spirit and future, which he will control. The name he draws is that of Clare Fishburn. Clare has a wife, June Randall, whom he adores; he has children; he has a thriving career as a teacher and land speculator and a possible political future. Beal’s threat at first pushes him into a kind of poignant despair and fear, yet Clare ultimately resists June’s urging that they escape to Portland, Oregon, and begins to undergo a deep interior philosophical investigation about the meaning of life. Books 5 and 6 show the settlers maturing and vast changes occurring in the political and economic spheres as the land gets civilized. Patterns begin to fulfill themselves: Minta replaces her lost children by adopting some needy Nooksack waifs. She becomes a liberated woman and a highly successful hops farmer, and she votes proudly in 1884, when Washington grants women suffrage. Ada (now Tawes) feels the days getting long and wonders how she can sustain her life after so much living. The novel’s events have moved from the primitive burning of trees to clear the land to sophisticated civic festivals such as the launching of a racing sloop built by a new Swedish immigrant. At this festival, Beal Obenchain realizes that his threat has not fazed Clare Fishburn, and he decides to rescind his threat, just to drive Clare mad. At the same time, Johnny Lee sees Obenchain with a handkerchief that is twin to his own; the twin had belonged to Lee’s murdered brother.

Meanwhile, in St. Paul, Minnesota, lumber entrepreneur Frederick Weyerhaeuser and railroad magnate James Hill make a mutually beneficial deal to ship immigrants west on trains and to ship lumber in the empty cars coming back. In Whatcom, the land rush is over; once again, the train terminus is set for another locale. Everyone is broke except for the Sharps, who have inherited the Obenchain estate; a stock-market crash is caused by a run on the banks during the debate over the gold standard. The news of the crash comes to Whatcom on the day of the town festival and beach picnic, when everyone feels unified, nostalgic, and full of life.

The final section reveals the ironies that history ushers in with its cycles. Ada Fishburn Tawes dies with the words of her original crossing of the plains on her lips. Clare Fishburn is humiliated that he has lost the fortune of his wife, who had excellent prospects as a senator’s daughter yet chose him. Women begin to replant trees in the town that men had spent so many years trying to clear of timber. Minta’s son Hugh plans to return to Baltimore to study medicine, a decision that makes the Honers’ time in the West seem a detour rather than a commitment. John Ireland Sharp, despite his learning, his social prestige, and his inheritance, feels more and more alienated from his family. As his wife, Pearl, is planning to take over the abandoned grand house that was being built during prosperous times, John wants to retreat to an island in Puget Sound and live simply.

By accident, Johnny Lee’s son Walter finds, in the hollowed-out tree that is Beal Obenchain’s home, the porcelain dragon that the murdered Lee Chin wore around his neck. Beal has found no comfort in reading the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, and he is filled with despair at the turn his life has taken. Simultaneously, John Sharp seeks Beal to give him his share of the inheritance. Beal is found dead near the spot where Lee Chin’s body was found. Whether his death was suicide or revenge remains unclear.

The afterword recounts the continued coping of the remaining characters. In the final scene, Hugh Honer throws himself off a platform in the dark into a pool, venturing into the unknown as his ancestors had.

The Characters

Annie Dillard develops the first half of the book by focusing on the individual sagas of single characters, family groups, or thematically linked pairs of characters. Each subsequent section also moves forward in time in terms of the waves of settlers who come to Bellingham Bay. Each of these introductory sections gives a history of how individuals related to the land upon their arrival, and how their characters and relationships developed as they encountered new hardships in the strange landscape.

Ada Fishburn, who is depicted in the first section, survives until the end of the novel, although the focus will shift to her sons and their generation. She is marked primarily by memories of loss—of her children and husband—and by her progress in accepting the native inhabitants and their ways as familiar. Dillard often presents Ada’s character in third-person omniscient narration; sometimes, she shows Ada’s emotional response to a scene. Ada is an intrepid pioneer and admirable survivor.

John Ireland Sharp, who is depicted in the second section, has ties to both the East and the West, and he is simultaneously an orphan and a man with historical roots in Whatcom. An educator who is greatly moved by the plight of the Chinese in America, John in his early years devotes himself to liberal social causes. His character is defined primarily by the events that shape him and his response to duties placed on him. Ironically, he becomes hermetic by the end of the novel.

Minta Honer, who loses her husband Eustace after they settle in Goshen, is portrayed as a strong and dedicated frontierswoman with a heart large enough to embrace the destitute and the alienated. She is revealed through the eyes of the omniscient third-person narrator in her response to challenge and tragedy in her life. The daughter of Senator Green Randall of Baltimore, Minta remakes herself entirely in the Western mode and is the model of a woman working toward becoming modern and liberated. Beal Obenchain is the idiosyncratic villain of the novel. He is presented rather dispassionately and objectively, but his inability to live in society is everywhere clear.

Obenchain’s inhumanity is even more insidious because of his intelligence and education. He in fact builds his power game against Clare Fishburn on Nietzschean philosophy.

Clare Fishburn, along with John Ireland Sharp, is the most sympathetically presented character in the novel. He is a man of feeling, aspiration, depth, and responsibility who, because of Obenchain’s plot against him, changes markedly as he learns what is valuable in life. He faces death and stares it down, releasing himself from fear and intellectual tyranny back into life.

Critical Context

Annie Dillard has been well received and highly acclaimed. Her work includes Holy the Firm (1977) and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), which are responses to nature in the transcendentalist tradition; An American Childhood (1987), her early autobiography; Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974), a collection of poems; and Living by Fiction (1982), which discusses in essay mode concerns of the modern writer. The Living is her first novel.

Reviews of the novel have been full of praise for the scope and humanity of The Living, for its ability to invoke in seamless prose the atmosphere of its inhabitants, and for its skillful weaving together of the seemingly disparate plot lines. Although The Living has no real models, it resembles in intent other fictionalized historical epic narratives, such as Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror (1978), and it perhaps imitates the naturalistic fiction of the turn of the twentieth century. Dillard’s novel, however, is remarkable for being an American epic and for focusing on a specific area not often centrally included in the story of the building and settling of America. The novel is also animated by her personal experience of life in the area and is reinforced by extensive historical research.

In The Living, Annie Dillard proves her diversity as a writer who has mastered the grand epic sweep of imagination. She is fast becoming a stalwart of American letters, having won grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the Pulitzer Prize, the Washington Governor’s Award, the New York Press Club Award, and the Ambassador Book Award in Arts and Letters from the English-Speaking Union.

Bibliography

Albin, C. D. “What the Living Know in Bellingham Bay.” The Christian Century 109 (October 7, 1992): 871-873. Focusing on the omnipresence of death and hardship in the novel, Albin sees the characters’ responses to the land as an education in how to accept the random irony of suffering. Albin praises Dillard’s techniques for revealing the inner lives of the characters. This is an admiring review, which ultimately decides that readers are strengthened by participating in the epic struggle.

Ames, Katrine. Review of The Living, by Annie Dillard. Newsweek 119 (June 8, 1992): 57. An enthusiastic review. Ames focuses on the authentic effect of the nineteenth century writing style that Dillard emulates. She compares Dillard to E. L. Doctorow in terms of the romantic sweep of the novel.

Davis, Hope Hale. “The Trials of Puget Sound.” The New Leader 75 (August 10, 1992): 17-19. In this review essay, Davis praises the vivid detail and immediacy of The Living and the psychological complexity of its characters.

DiConsiglio, John. “Annie Dillard.” Literary Cavalcade 50 (March, 1998): 22. DiConsiglio examines Dillard’s family background, career highlights, literary style, and major published works. Although this essay does not specifically address The Living, it does provide penetrating insight into Dillard’s works.

Johnson, Sandra Humble. The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1992. Johnson’s extensive critical exploration of all Dillard’s work focuses on epiphany as a recurring trait of her writing. Although it was written before the novel The Living was published, Johnson’s discussion includes an analysis of the short story on which the novel is based. Johnson sees “The Living” as an allegory or morality tale.

Kingsolver, Barbara. “Whipsawed in Washington.” The Nation 254 (May 25, 1992): 692-694. Kingsolver’s review of The Living focuses on the novel’s ironies and the striking distance between its nineteenth century concerns and those of its contemporary readers. Kingsolver finds many strengths in Dillard’s novel, including her use of language, the depth of characters’ insights into their lives, and the intensity of character portrayals.

The New Yorker. Review of The Living, by Annie Dillard. 68 (July 6, 1992): 80. Notes how Dillard’s attitude toward the natural world differs from its treatment in her earlier works: Here, nature is antagonistic to humans rather than in harmony with them. The reviewer deplores the many deaths in the novel as well as what is perceived as weak plot and character development.

Parrish, Nancy C. Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Parrish focuses on the southern women’s school, Hollins College, and explores how a women’s writing community evolved within the college. She also praises the writers who helped launch it, including Annie Dillard.

Scheese, Don. Review of The Living, by Annie Dillard. The Georgia Review 47 (Spring, 1993): 193-197. Scheese tries to contextualize the novel in the light of Dillard’s own body of work and in the light of the turn-of-the-century fiction by Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. His primary observations concern Dillard’s use of the ideas of Social Darwinism and Manifest Destiny. He believes that the land is a major character in the novel and that Dillard has written her own self into the piece. Finally, Scheese praises the deep religious response that the novel evokes.

Smith, Linda L. Annie Dillard. New York: Twayne, 1991. Smith gives biographical background and extended critical discussions of Dillard’s works. She sees three major concerns in “The Living” (the short story version) and Dillard’s work in general: the nature of human consciousness, the nature of suffering and death, and how people should live in the face of suffering and death. Contains a bibliography of primary and secondary sources and an index.

Smith, Pamela A. “The Ecotheology of Annie Dillard: A Study in Ambivalence.” Cross Currents 45 (Fall, 1995): 341-358. Smith argues that Dillard’s works elucidate ecology worship as a theological concept, although the philosophy is silent about the destruction of nature. Implicit in the decay of nature is that God and nature are equally important and elusive.

Stewart, Albert B. Review of The Living, by Annie Dillard. The Antioch Review 50 (Fall, 1992): 772. Stewart praises Dillard for the power of her details in the novel. He finds enough matter in The Living for twelve novels and admires the way Dillard has synthesized the many stories into a patterned whole. The details bring the novel a sense of reality and genuineness, a historical accuracy. With wit and subtlety, Dillard reveals many of her characters to have spiritual energy to overcome the inertia of overwhelming loss and death.