Madeleine L'Engle, 1963.
The Game of Reading recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. It has evolved and complexified over the years, but never faltered, and it is still among other things gradually frog-marching me through the books I read between 2009 and 2016.
Last month, I drew the card for the beloved fantasy classic A Wrinkle in Time -- the 293rd greatest book of all time, according to a literary data-grinder that I am very partial to -- and was surprised to see a two-star rating for it in my reading history. When I finished, I slapped together this capsule review:
2026
This time, two prefaces shaped my reading of Wrinkle in Time. One was an appreciation about how it's not just for kids, which, under the rules of this game, tipped me off that it should best be considered a book for kids. The other was a note from the author about how adults don't always get this book, because it like blows their whole narrow world view, man, but the kids understand -- from which I gathered that critique on intellectual grounds would be considered unfair play and evidence of my narrow world view, man.
The strength of the book is its strong characters, set up in a lengthy opening here on good ol' planet Earth. Its weakness is the sequence-of-random-events plot that follows, once Earth is left behind. The jointure between the two sections is abrupt enough that I had to back up about a half hour to figure out why the kids who had been kicking around in the woods were suddenly flying on unicorn-esque beasts across alien planetscapes, breathing through flowers.
Still, it's no 2-starrer. Promoted!
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This made me wonder where the 2-star rating had come from in the first place. With a modest application of search engine, I was able to find and search this weblog, which still technically exists. Turns out that me of December 2010, whoever he was, wrote a review that hits several of the same notes. In some ways that guy is a stranger -- so arrogant in his relative youth, so ignorant of the allure of accounting, so airily dismissive of the notion that Don Trump might someday refashion the United States as a tinhorn dictatorship, driving such an old truck -- but he seemed to share a lot of my feelings about Madeline L'Engle's great work. It's kind of a.... a.... wrinkle in time, if you will.
2010
I first read A Wrinkle in Time in third grade or thereabouts, and was vaguely conscious of being not as impressed as others seemed to be with this beloved classic of children’s science fiction. When the late Madeline L’Engle passed away shortly after the Reading List elections back in aught-seven, I decided to add Wrinkle to the List, expecting to be enchanted, or at least suitably impressed, this time around.
Alas, I am still a little underwhelmed. Whatever its virtues -- we’ll get to those in a minute -- A Wrinkle in Time is a real muddle. It involves a series of rather job-lot supernatural events -- some are fantastical, some are apparently mock-fantastical, some are science-fictionish -- that have only the thinnest logical connection among them. Villains with no clear motive must be fought within rules that are never really explained with the help of allies whose roles are unclear and whose tremendous powers, for reasons which seem rather arbitrary, have very specific limitations that force them to rely on a high school freshman and her little brother to save the universe.The primary characters bounce from event to event, having experiences that are only structured by the order the Ms. L’Engle wrote them in. That they by and large merely endure a series of trials, rather than actively engaging in a in a course of action, is a necessary side effect of a fictive universe with no particular rhyme or reason to it.
To be sure, Wrinkle adheres to the ground rules of children’s fiction. The characters succeed through perseverance and courage, their love of family and friends is affirmed as a principle human value, and it is stressed that it is OK to be and feel different than your peers. The book, published in 1963, is like much literature of that period in making a memorable assault on suburban conformity and the corporate mentality. Wrinkle is also lovable for its suggestion that it might be OK, or even kind of cool, to be smart and know things.
Most of my friends on the “GoodReads” online bookworm site rate A Wrinkle in Time very highly. One notes it as one of the books that opened up the possibility of realities other than the mundane one that we all had to wait through as children. From its reputation, it’s clear that Wrinkle played a similar role in the lives of a great many other of us bookish dreams. That’s a wonderful thing, and I can salute it, even while suggesting that this is not really a book that holds up well to an adult reading.
