From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
'A Wrinkle' Ages Gracefully
Reading Madeleine L'Engle as a child and as an adult.
Was I the only sixth-grader who didn't love "A Wrinkle in Time"? The recent death of Madeleine L'Engle, who wrote the 1963 Newbery Medal winner, has evinced so many adulatory remembrances from other ex-sixth-graders that it's brought back memories of having felt like an oddball for not warming to the book's oddball protagonist, Meg Murry. We even shared a first name, yet I somehow couldn't work up much affection for Ms. L'Engle's awkward, glasses-wearing heroine, despite how brave and clever she turned out to be. Heroines, it seemed to me, ought to be dashing and pretty and, if possible, drive roadsters.
"A Wrinkle in Time," you may recall, tells the story of how Meg, her brilliant little brother Charles Wallace, and a high-school boy named Calvin are helped by three magical beings--Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Who--to rescue Meg's scientist father from IT, a pulsing disembodied brain on a distant planet that is in league with a sinister black cloud seeking to devour the universe. There are no boarding schools, no plucky orphans, no princesses, certainly no roadsters--none of the comforting tropes of children's fiction. Yet once you'd read it, you couldn't rid yourself of it. "A Wrinkle in Time" was like a bit of grit in the oyster; a narrative irritant that you kept trying to digest.
Of course I wasn't the only reader to find Ms. L'Engle's work of science fantasy initially disconcerting. Famously, 26 publishers rebuffed the manuscript before the author found a benefactor in Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1962. Winning the Newbery a year later secured the book's place in the pantheon of children's literature, and since then innumerable schoolchildren have experienced the dazzling weirdness of a story that starts with quantum physics and ends with a child's love overcoming vast powers of evil.
"It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice," Ms. L'Engle said in her Newbery acceptance speech. "And it was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant."
Coming back to the book 30 years later, it's striking how true the same process is for the reader. A child is inclined to take away very different lessons from a novel than is an adult. For one thing, "A Wrinkle in Time" is infused with Christian faith to such a degree that, were it newly published today, it would probably be relegated to the religious section of the bookstore.
As a heathen child, I missed entirely the biblical references, the significant mention of Jesus and the way a loving God's sovereignty over the universe is understood even as the characters battle an expanding force of pure evil. Meg's father, at one point, urges her to be courageous in confronting IT. "We were sent here for something," he tells her, echoing Romans 8:28. "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose."
Clearly, American society wasn't as twitchy about Judeo-Christian content 40-odd years ago. In fact, over the decades "A Wrinkle in Time" has been criticized as insufficiently Christian, a claim that pained its Episcopalian author. The novel is ranked 22nd on the American Library Association's list of the 100 "most frequently challenged" books that agitators seek to ban.
The complaints will sound familiar to anyone who has overheard the controversy about the Harry Potter series (itself No. 7 on the ALA's list). In Ms. L'Engle's most famous work, some have objected to an apparent witch, a clairvoyant and the manner in which Jesus is referred to as merely one of earth's great fighters against darkness, not the Light. In strict religious families, these elements may well interfere with children's religious formation.
But subversion works both ways. For children raised in nonreligious households, as I was, Ms. L'Engle's narrative grit could, it seems, produce years later a kind of pearl. Rereading the book recently, I was amazed at the familiar resonance of the passages whose religious import I had thought eluded me as a child. It will be interesting to see whether Harry Potter leaves a similar spiritual comet-trail in the millions of children who've read his story, now that, with the final book in the series, J.K. Rowling has revealed the wizarding world to be unquestionably Christian--though maybe it's not possible to test the long-term effects of literature the way you can, say, fluoride.
Every book is a product of its time, and so is the way it's read. Ms. L'Engle wrote "A Wrinkle in Time" in the depths of the Cold War, and the horror of totalitarianism is there in her depiction of IT's planet, where Meg's father is imprisoned. In the story, the three children arrive on Camazotz to see endless rows of identical houses, before each of which a small boy stands and bounces a ball in exactly the same rhythm as every other boy. But one child keeps getting it wrong, and when his ball bounces off into the street he's rushed into the house by his terrified mother. Some of my friends were convinced that L'Engle's target was conformist suburbia (there was a lot of scornful talk of that in 1976). But to me, Meg's eventual triumph over IT meant that free people would surely someday be able to push back the creeping menace of communism. A sixth-grader picking up the book today will presumably take away another message altogether.
Like Madeleine L'Engle, who was as surprised as anyone at the content of her own novel, C.S. Lewis didn't start out to write a Christian fable when he began "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe." But as he proceeded, he explained to a friend, he "saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood."
Not long ago, my two eldest children were obliged to read "A Wrinkle in Time" for school. Neither liked it much. "Meg was such a nerd," said my daughter. "I didn't get all the tesseract and time-travel stuff," complained my son. It doesn't matter. Madeleine L'Engle may have departed this world, but in the children who continue to read her best-known novel, she keeps depositing those little bits of grit.
Mrs. Gurdon reviews children's books for The Wall Street Journal.
