The Life Behind A Wrinkle in Time

Yesterday’s New York Times Book Review asked Anne Lamott, “What book changed your life?” And she answered:

“A Wrinkle in Time” saved me because it so captured the grief and sense of isolation I felt as a child. I was 8 years old when it came out, in third grade, and I believed in it — in the plot, the people and the emotional truth of their experience. This place was never a good match for me, but the book greatly diminished my sense of isolation as great books have done ever since. I must have read it a dozen times.

The book never grabbed me that way, but it spoke deeply to many readers. Cynthia Zarin’s 2004 profile of Madeleine L’Engle included the author’s response to their passion:

One evening, while we were having supper together, I asked L’Engle about her relationship with her readers. “It scares me shitless!” she said. “Because it’s a responsibility. Over time, someone reads your book, and something happens. People want intimacy, and I have a terrible time saying no.” When people tell her, “You’ve helped me grow up, you’re my mother,” she tends to brush it off: her job, as she sees it, is to write stories, not to be known.

That warts-and-all profile appears to be a touchstone for many of the interviews in Listening for Madeleine, Leonard Marcus’s new oral history of L’Engle. The Book Reporter says of the book:

Most interesting are the voices from L’Engle’s childhood, through whom we learn about her distant relationship with her parents, particularly her father, and about her tendency to live her life through her imagination rather than through social relationships—more than one interviewee describes L’Engle as aloof or standoffish compared to her peers. Marcus seems to suggest that her lonely childhood and longing for her dad contributed to the number of absent fathers in her work, most notably Meg’s quest to rescue her father in A Wrinkle in Time.

One of those interviews, with a L’Engle cousin, is available from Macmillan. Publishers Weekly published three from colleagues. Kirkus noted in its review:

An actor by training, L’Engle consciously constructed her own public persona, transforming her biography and history into “mythic material,” as with the ever-expanding number of rejections she received for A Wrinkle in Time.

The Oz and Ends take on that legend back here.

A Wrinkle in Lettering

Powell’s really really really needs to add Madeleine L’Engle as a linked author on its webpage for Hope Larson’s adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time into comics form. It’ll sell more copies that way.

I was struck by this detail from MTV Geek’s interview with Larson about the particular challenges of adapting A Wrinkle in Time, with its cerebral vibe, to a graphic format:

I tried to trim the dialogue for space wherever possible, but most of the time it wasn’t. The dialogue carries the burden of almost everything that happens in this book. What saved me was doing final lettering as part of my thumbnail step, so I was sure there’d be room for everything before I put pencil to paper. There are a few panels where the characters are being crushed under a ton of text, but those are infrequent. By making the book nearly 400 pages long, I was able to air it out some.

That reminded me of the method Gene Luen Yang used for Prime Baby, as he described here:

Because Prime Baby was both text-heavy (the protagonist is a wordy little sociopath) and limited in space (it was originally published in The New York Times Magazine), I laid out the words in Photoshop first and then sketched over print-outs of the dialog.

Looking ahead to L’Engle’s sequels, Larson said:

I can’t see myself doing another adaptation. I talked to friends about this adaptation being like grad school—I got my Masters in L’Engle, and now I’m done. I’m done drawing comics, period, for the time being. I felt similarly after completing Mercury, and took a year off drawing, which was the same amount of time it took me to draw that book. Maybe I need to be off drawing for two years, since that was how long it took me to draw Wrinkle. I’ll reevaluate things next September.

So if you were the publisher, considering how long adaptations take, would you have already recruited another graphic novelist to adapt A Wind in the Door? And whom would you choose?

Batting for the Cycle

What comes after trilogy?

Christopher Paolini and Random House originally announced his Inheritance books as a trilogy, but writing Brisingr revealed plot threads and vowels that needed to go somewhere. The trilogy therefore became a four-book “cycle,” which will conclude this year. Unless he has more ideas.

For Diana Wynne Jones, the Dalemark books are a “quartet” while other series are open-ended. For Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time grew into the “Time Quartet,” though some critics have used the term “tetralogy.”

And for Stephenie Meyer, Twilight just seems to be a “series.” That has the non-specificity of “cycle” without even the implication of a closed circle.

The Fantasies of Asperger Fiction

Among Oz readers and in other fantasy fandoms, I've met readers who acknowledge having some of the traits of Asperger syndrome, or even formal diagnoses of it. Indeed, I suspect that some fantasy literature might even hold special appeal to people with those conditions.

To begin with, fantasy literature involves figuring out how an unusual world or hidden aspect of this world works, often as an outsider. Many series end in societies that welcome people of diverse types, as in the Emerald City under Princess Ozma. Both qualities might appeal to smart readers who've found that they think differently from most of the people around them.

Another possible attraction of fantasy series is their sprawling level of detail: books, characters, locales, fictional histories, and adaptations into other media--all for a highly detail-oriented person to enjoy mastering. If those universes weren't so sprawling, they might be less appealing.

As much as fantasy novels can appeal to people with Asperger syndrome, I haven't been pleased with how the ones I've read actually portray the condition. We don't fully understand Asperger's, and fantasy lets authors explore such mysteries by connecting them to otherworldly forces and dimensions. Unfortunately, that approach risks obscuring the fact that autism/Asperger's is a way of being human in this world.

Diane Duane's A Wizard Alone brings on a new "young wizard" named Darryl McAllister, who's been diagnosed as autistic. Kit, one of the protagonists from So You Want to Be a Wizard, sets out to help him.

However, Darryl's autism is atypical: he suddenly developed the condition at age eight. And the resolution of his story is (***SPOILER***) even more atypical. Magical events allow Darryl simply to "ditch" his autism and recover fully, to the surprise of his parents and teachers. Plus, he gets to stay magical.

Thor Wignutt in Summerland has no formal diagnosis, but I immediately thought of "Aspie" kids when I read Michael Chabon's description of the character. Thor first appears speaking and acting like an android, a sign of how out of place he feels. He's one of the three children who travel to a fantasy dimension, but we never get into his head the way we do with the other two.

Eventually it turns out (***SPOILER***) that Thor is a changeling, which both explains his condition and leads to him making his home in that other place. (It's actually occurred to a number of people that autism might be the root of myths about changelings.)

One last possible example: some parents of children with Asperger's have interpreted Charles Wallace Murray in A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels, and perhaps even Meg Murray herself, as fitting along the autism spectrum. Again, Madeleine L'Engle portrayed Charles Wallace's unusual behavior as connected to larger forces in the universe.

The first two of these fantasy novels treat the autistic characters' conditions--whether explicitly stated as on the spectrum or not--as problems to be solved rather than as conditions of life for some people. All hint that the root of the characters' difficulties, and any remedies, come from out of this world. Does modern fantasy literature treat other chronic conditions the same way?

A New Use for Single Quote Marks?

My final posting for this Oz and Ends PUNCTUATION WEEK concerns a use of quotation marks in fiction that's not standard, as far as I can tell, but might become so.

In a few books, when the text quotes words that no character is saying in the present scene--words that a character has said before, or often says, or that another character imagines being said--that dialogue appears in single quote marks instead of the regular (American) double quote marks.

I first noticed this usage in Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, published in 1987. Since then, I've kept my eyes open for other books using the same style, and the earliest book in which I've spotted it is Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door (1973), the first sequel to A Wrinkle in Time. (It may not be coincidence that both those titles came from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)

Here are a couple of passages from A Wind in the Door, chapter three, showing this style in action:

The children were all fond of Dr. Louise, and trusted her completely as a physician, but they were not quite sure that she had their parents’ capacity to accept the extraordinary. Almost sure, but not quite. Dr. Colubra had a good deal in common with their parents; she, too, had given up work which paid extremely well in both money and prestige, to come live in this small rural village. (‘Too many of my colleagues have forgotten they are supposed to practice the art of healing. If I don’t have the gift of healing in my hands, then all my expensive training isn’t worth very much.’) She, too, had turned her back on the glitter of worldly success.

And a page later:

“You haven’t proven them to me,” Dr. Louise said. “Yet!” She looked slightly ruffled, like a little grey bird. Her short, curly hair was grey; her eyes were grey above a small beak of a nose; she wore a grey flannel suit. “The main reason I think you may be right is that you go to that idiot machine--” she pointed at the micro-electron microscope--“the way my husband used to go to his violin. It was always a lovers’ meeting.“

Mrs. Murry turned away from her ‘idiot machine.’ “I think I wish I’d never heard of farandolae, much less come to the conclusions--” She stopped abruptly, then said, “By the way, kids, I was rather surprised, just before you all barged into the lab, to have Mr. Jenkins call to suggest that we give Charles Wallace lessons in self-defense.”

I wouldn't have used single quote marks in those passages. (And I wouldn't have included the sixth comma in the first passage, or punctuated the clause about the micro-electron microscope within Dr. Louise’s dialogue like that, either.)

I’ve looked in style guides to see if any state this usage is standard, or even a common option, and haven’t found one that recommends treating some quotations differently from others this way. The closest guideline is a Chicago Manual of Style stipulation that in philosophical and linguistic texts certain terms might be enclosed in single quote marks (14th edition, 6.67 and 6.74).

To prepare for this posting, I kept watch for an example of standard use of quote marks in the same situation, and found one in Gail Gauthier's The Hero of Ticonderoga (2001):

Mom sighed one of her “I’m trying to keep from killing you” sighs. “No, it does not.”

The dialogue that start “I’m trying...” would be within single quote marks in the system L'Engle and Turow used. That might even be clearer about what's spoken aloud in that scene and what the narrator is recalling from earlier moments. But until that system becomes standard, and readers know how to interpret it on the fly, I think it risks being confusing instead of clarifying.

Has anyone else come across this quirk of punctuation? Has it gotten into any style guides? Does anyone use it all the time?

A Wrinkle in Time in Its Own Time—and Ours

Square Fish, the new paperback imprint of Farrar, Straus and its corporate cousins, sent me the "Special Teacher's Edition with Bonus Material" of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, part of a promotion that includes a dedicated website.

This reissue includes Anna Quindlen's thought-provoking five-page appreciation of the book at the front. Quindlen reminds us how A Wrinkle in Time grew out of the cultural concerns of the early 1960s:

The identical houses outside which identical children bounce balls and jump rope in mindless unison evoke the fear that so many Americans had of Communist regimes that enshrined the interests of state-mandated order over the rights of the individual.

Yet within the next ten years, American youth would see the danger of conformity coming from quite a different direction: from within American society itself. That theme of the book remains powerful over four decades later, even as our notions of sameness continue to evolve.

The heroine Meg's personal geekiness is another way that A Wrinkle in Time proved to be a leading indicator of changes in our culture. She was smart but not socially adept, scared but insistent. And of course she was a girl in a novel with more than a dollop of science fiction, a genre then considered for males only. Meg presaged many changes in children's literature, and remains resonant today while most female protagonists from other forty-year-old books seem historic.

Indeed, about the only important detail that feels dated in A Wrinkle in Time to me is the shame Meg and her family feel about local whispers that her father has abandoned them. Divorce no longer being such a taboo and anathema, I suspect that the community would react differently today, even if the family felt the same.

As a last, minor illustration of L'Engle's prescience, the great villain of the novel is IT, a "cold and calculating disembodied intelligence." In 1961, when L'Engle started to write, who could have foretold that forty years on we'd all be in thrall to Departments of I.T. and their machines?

The other bonus material in this Special Teacher's Edition is:

• an interview with L'Engle (also available as a PDF download from this page)
• L'Engle's Newbery acceptance speech from 1963 (also available here)
  
• a cast of characters for her two main series (Murrys and Austins), with intertwined family trees
• a Discussion and Activity Guide, with web resources

More Wrinkles about A Wrinkle in Time

Back in September I wrote about the legend of how A Wrinkle in Time came to be published, and how much publishing has changed since then. Here are some more thoughts about that book's initial reception.

Powell's shares the "Special Message" from Madeleine L'Engle printed in the book's recent paperback editions, and in it she discusses what she perceived as a difficult path to publication. She wrote:

A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published. You can’t name a major publisher who didn’t reject it. And there were many reasons.

One was that it was supposedly too hard for children. Well, my children were 7, 10, and 12 while I was writing it. I’d read to them at night what I’d written during the day, and they’d say, “Ooh, mother, go back to the typewriter!”

A Wrinkle in Time had a female protagonist in a science fiction book, and that wasn’t done. And it dealt with evil and things that you don’t find, or didn’t at that time, in children’s books.

Now anyone who's been in publishing for a while knows that the fact that an author's own children or other relatives like a book carries no weight with editors. L'Engle, a published novelist, would have known that as well as anyone. (Surely someone had told her something like, "My children love our old family stories. Won't you recommend them to your agent?")

A book one's children love could be a good book, or they could be good children, eager to support their beloved parent. The book could speak to all children of those ages, or it could speak a special family language. That doesn't mean there aren't relatives ready to rip a story apart because of different tastes or honest criticism or some Freudian resentments. It simply means that editors can't know whose kids fall into what category, so "My kids like it a lot" is meaningless to them. (The same rules apply to parents.)

As for L'Engle's next two reasons, they really boil down to the fact that A Wrinkle in Time was a revolutionary book. It broke the widespread assumptions and expectations of its era. It came out in 1963, basically the last year of the 1950s--before the feminist movement, before the youth culture, before the counterculture, before widespread interest in non-western beliefs and innovative spiritual seeking. It's very hard for a book to be both truly revolutionary and a good commercial bet.

I find it significant that the 1963 Newbery committee balanced out L'Engle's rules-breaking science-fiction fantasy with not one but two undeniably serious and traditional Honor Books:

• Thistle and Thyme: Tales and Legends from Scotland, by Sorche Nic Leodhas (pseudonym of Leclaire Alger)
• Men of Athens, by Olivia Coolidge

Both those titles are out of print now. The first made The Brookeshelf's "Forgotten Books" list last month. The latter has earned one comment at Amazon. They basically reflect a world of traditionalist children's literature that A Wrinkle in Time helped wipe away.

Wrinkles in the Legend of A Wrinkle in Time

One of the legends in modern children's publishing--perhaps American publishing in general--is how Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time was rejected by dozens of publishers before Farrar, Straus & Giroux took a chance on it. The number of publishers varies a bit with the telling: "forty-odd," according to L'Engle's "Special Message" in recent paperback copies; twenty-six, according to most webpages.

Whatever the numbers, the tale serves to fill authors with hope. It reassures us that ground-breaking work may have trouble from short-sighted gatekeepers, but will eventually find acclaim. All we have to do is persevere through those years of rejections.

But the details of the story, now more than forty years old, may not offer that much hope to today's writers. To begin with, L'Engle was a published novelist with a literary agent, Theron Raines. She wasn't an unknown sending her manuscript out herself, like most hopeful authors then and now.

Then there's the question of timing. L'Engle finished her manuscript in 1960. It was published in 1962. L'Engle has spoken and written of a frustrating "two years of rejections," though that was the same amount of time it took her agent to find a publisher for Meet the Austins (1960). I know a lot of writers who've been trying longer than two years to sell a book they believe in.

And let's divide the number of rejections by that time span. Twenty-six rejections in less about two years is approximately one a month. ("Forty-odd" rejections would come closer to one every two weeks.) Of course that stretch would be frustrating and painful for any writer, and I don't begrudge L'Engle an ounce of her pride at being vindicated. But with publishers' turnaround times at six months to a year these days, it's a rare writer who can expect to hear from so many publishers so fast, good news or bad.

Finally, here's how A Wrinkle in Time finally found a home at Farrar, Straus & Giroux in L'Engle's own words:

We gave up. Then my mother was visiting for Christmas, and I gave her a tea party for some of her old friends. One of them happened to belong to a small writing group run by John Farrar, of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which at that time did not have a juvenile list. She insisted that I meet John any how, and I went down with my battered manuscript. John had read my first novel and liked it, and read this book and loved it. That’s how it happened.

So an excellent manuscript is necessary--and any manuscript that causes a firm to expand the types of books it publishes must be excellent. But in the end the sale of A Wrinkle in Time depended on a visit from Mom, one of her friends, and a personal introduction to the co-owner of a publishing company.