Rereading “A Wrinkle in Time,” After a Childhood Enthralled by Madeleine L’Engle

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As a child, I was bewitched by the Madeleine L’Engle’s divine presences. Now I’m moved by her human sympathies.Photograph courtesy Crosswicks, Ltd.

As a kid, you are tossed incessantly against your own limitations. So much about the world is unfathomable; your job is to dispel some of the dimness, with help from adults and firsthand experience. Your brain is a miner’s lamp, swivelling toward the knowledge shimmering in the dark rock. If the process goes well, you might start to believe that all mysteries are solvable.

This is education at its most romantic: a dawning apprehension of half-hidden forms. A book that is “educational” in this sense might combine appreciation for the powers of the mind with an air of secrecy and occlusion, as in the work of the young-adult author Madeleine L’Engle, whose novel “A Wrinkle in Time,” from 1962, has finally been adapted into a movie: a live-action, sherbet-hued fantasia from Ava DuVernay, the director of “Selma” and “13th,” starring Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, and Oprah Winfrey as the three cosmic godmothers and the newcomer Storm Reid as the child protagonist, Meg Murry.

L’Engle has a gift for baiting intellectual hooks, for making life feel irresistibly mysterious. What I remember most about her “Wrinkle in Time” quintet, which I read as a grade schooler in the early aughts, is the fiercely pleasant torture of forcing my imagination to bend in bizarre ways. To read L’Engle is to enroll your brain in a yoga class four levels too advanced. “A Wrinkle in Time,” the quintet’s first entry, tells the story of Meg, who voyages across galaxies with her friend and brother in search of her lost father. She encounters celestial beings disguised as witchy old ladies; flowers that exhale oxygen; furry, tentacled beasts that perceive the world through an incommunicable sixth sense. Meg’s brother, Charles Wallace, is cryptically “gifted”—he somehow seems to maintain a direct line to the essences of things. He knows what Meg is thinking, especially when he wears his “intently listening look.” Charles Wallace is one of many characters in the novel who repeatedly say lines like “I can’t quite explain” and “It won’t go into words.”

Twenty years ago, those sentences caused me almost physical pain. The curiosity that they inflamed, the sense of transcendence just out of reach, was extraordinary, and I hadn’t yet learned to accept the finality of certain limitations. L’Engle’s adult human protagonists are mostly scientists. Her books exalt math, reason, and problem-solving. But the villain in “A Wrinkle in Time” is cold cerebrality taken to the extreme: a large brain that enforces conformity from “the CENTRAL Central Intelligence Building.” L’Engle, a lifelong Episcopalian whose gentle spirituality suffused her writing, was the brilliant teacher who kept insisting on how little she knew, a logician in awe of the numinous.

At one point in “A Wrinkle in Time,” Mrs. Whatsit, the youngest of the children’s heavenly guardians, metamorphoses into “something like a horse but at the same time completely unlike a horse.” L’Engle continues: “From the magnificently modeled back sprang a nobly formed torso, arms, and a head resembling a man’s, but a man with a perfection of dignity and virtue, an exaltation of joy such as Meg had never before seen. . . . From the shoulders slowly a pair of wings unfolded, wings made of rainbows, of light upon water, of poetry.” This is anti-description, a breathless unravelling. The language of approximation (like a horse, resembling a man) melts into language about the inadequacy of language (but also unlike a horse, a man but better) and then to abstraction: What could wings made of poetry possibly look like? Before a reader can even try to process such a vision, Mrs. Whatsit is aloft, showing her charges the “garden more beautiful than a dream,” where creatures like her are singing, “making music that came not only from their throats but from the movement of their great wings as well.” Of course, Meg cannot understand the words. But Charles Wallace, displaying his alert and riddling expression, says that he can pick up “a little. Just a very little.”

I went back and reread “A Wrinkle in Time” a few days ago. I expected to feel that familiar, frustrating ache. But I must have lost my youthful intimation that some ancient psalm was on the tip of my tongue. As a thirty-year-old, I’ve reconciled myself to collecting meaning in glints and shards. “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / upon the growing Boy,” Wordsworth wrote. He meant that adult humans don’t get serenaded by winged equines or speak alien languages.

So, on my second go-round with the Murry kids, I didn’t spend forty-five minutes tangling with the sentence about the beasts that “saw, knew, understood, far more completely” than any of the human characters, or wondering what such knowledge would entail. Instead, I fell in love again with Meg. I adored Meg as a girl, too, but I didn’t think about her much. She was me, and she felt the way I felt. When Charles Wallace retreated into his mystic glooms, she yearned to follow, but couldn’t. (“I don’t understand,” she repeats, in tones of alternating wonder, supplication, and fury.) This time, other facets of the protagonist stood out. She is isolated and sad; she misses her dad terribly. She turns her pain in on herself. “It’s not just the weather,” Meg reflects. “It’s the weather on top of everything else. On top of me. On top of Meg Murry doing everything wrong.” She has frizzy brown hair, thick glasses, and braces. A neighbor calls her “that unattractive girl.” Her teachers find her “belligerent” and “antagonistic,” and the only people who seem to show her any kindness are her flame-haired scientist-babe mother (tough break) and her little brother.

But Meg is kind, smart, and curious. She adds extra sweet pickles to a tuna sandwich she is making for an unannounced guest, even though no one asks her to (and she doesn’t trust the guest). She can calculate square roots in her head. She is ferociously loyal and protective. And when the evil brain is weaving a verbal shroud of banalities to entrap her, she interrupts it with a revelation that is more than intellectual nitpicking, that shudders with moral force. Meg has just recited a line from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” The brain has retorted: “But that’s exactly what we have on Camazotz. Complete equality. Everybody exactly alike.” “No!” Meg answers, cutting through the pablum of a master sophist. “Like and equal are not the same thing at all!”

“A Wrinkle in Time,” the movie, seems similarly taken with Meg, in that its primary concern is getting its protagonist to understand that she is, in the vaguest possible way, beautiful and extraordinary. Helmed by a brilliant black woman and spotlighting a talented young black actress, the new “Wrinkle” is a triumph in terms of representation but not storytelling; its messaging is too pat to reflect the book’s exploratory spirit. The adaptation flattens L’Engle’s characters and themes into the most simplistic, feel-good version of themselves. Movie-Meg defeats the darkness when she learns to embrace the person she is; she discovers not some ineffable quality of light or interconnectedness out in the universe but, rather, the self-help mantra that she deserves love. A message of affirmation directed specifically toward black girls is thrilling, but movie-Meg hardly has any features beyond her wounds and self-doubt, whereas everywhere on the page were indications of a full, complicated consciousness: drama-queen narration, a willingness to wrestle philosophically with new ideas, a sweetness to balance out the stubbornness and sullenness. Meanwhile, the rest of the film’s mechanics are so rote and obvious, its coincidences so contrived, that the original “Wrinkle”—all capaciousness and wonder—feels very far away.

But the movie is also big-hearted. Its well-meaning imperfections somehow leave me in the same poignant place that my second reading of the book did: moved by L’Engle’s human sympathies rather than enthralled by her divine presences. The sublime is not like our enduring values and relationships—it doesn’t linger. After Meg returns home, the whole Murry family is overcome, “talking and laughing all at once . . . the joy and love were so tangible that Meg felt . . . she could touch it with her bare hands.” The guardians, though, are needed elsewhere, for reasons that are not revealed. “There was a gust of wind,” L’Engle writes, “and they were gone.”