When the story opens, Lou, a sometime painter, and Toby, a poet and house mover, fall intensely, almost instantly in love, and thereafter the phases of such a state are examined. In their early, heady days together, Lou, “shipwrecked on the sheets,” “opened her eyes and discovered where on their bed she had fetched up.” In her impassioned innocence, “love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature?” Likewise, a “wider life” breathed in Toby. “Only the lover sees what is real, he thought. … Far from being blind, love alone can see.”
In two beautifully told death scenes, Dillard has managed to achieve what Chekhov did with death in “The Bishop.” He “takes the mystery out of dying, makes it almost an ordinary occurrence,”
- via nytimes http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/books/review/Reed-t.html?pagewanted=2
