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For example, Anaral, a prehistoric Native American character in An Acceptable Time, seemingly speaks for L'Engle when in Chase's entry for April 23 we hear her sing what Chase calls a "Good Morning Song to Our Mother." As Chase presents it, the song seems to represent L'Engle's expression of devotion to a feminine deity; in the novel, however, the scene works to establish the differences between the world of L'Engle's protagonist and that of the prehistoric Native Americans while initiating a bond of friendship between the two female characters. My quibble is not with the gender of the deity—L'Engle talks intelligently elsewhere about her understanding of God's androgyny. Rather, my complaint is with the alteration of meaning that can occur when scenes like this are removed from the framework of the novels. When fiction is not read as fiction but as philosophy or aphorism, the reader, however well-intentioned, does the writer a significant injustice.
I would be remiss as reviewer if I did not immediately point out that L'Engle approved Chase's selection of entries for Glimpses of Grace. "I was amazed," L'Engle writes, "at how well she had articulated my theology, fitting my many questions and rare answers neatly together." But it is, I think, that very neatness that offends. L'Engle is many things in her writing, but she is not tidy.
In her nonfiction, she probes and circles, contradicts and reasserts. In her fiction, she creates heroes and heroines who are similarly messy. Thus, when readers hear L'Engle muse about belief subject to change, they know what she means. It is that very struggle that she works out in the pages of her nonfiction and that her characters—Camilla Dickinson and Mac Xanthakos, Adam Eddington, Zachary Gray, and Polly O'Keefe—muddle through in her novels. For this reader, at least, such messiness is part of L'Engle's appeal, and to canonize her ideas in a meditational book comes close to idolizing what should really be iconic.
The distinction between idol and icon is one that appears in L'Engle's Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols, her sixth volume of nonfiction in the Wheaton Literary Series from Harold Shaw Press—another subgenre, if you will, of L'Engle's work. Each of these volumes asks some version of the same question: "What does it mean to be human and to be a child of God?" The answer in each case is both personal and public, for L'Engle moves quite freely from autobiographical reflection to social commentary to theological and aesthetic speculation.
A Circle of Quiet:
The Crosswicks Journals, Book 1
by Madeleine L'Engle
arperSanFrancisco
256 pp.; $13, paper
And here is perhaps another reason for the crowd in the line for the book-signing.
L'Engle's apparent transparency as she reflects on the vocation of the artist in Walking on Water or on the relationship of story and truth in A Rock That Is Higher puts readers on a first-name basis with the author.
The informal structure and unpretentious voice of these books invite the audience to join L'Engle in the sitting room of her mind, to eavesdrop as the author thinks aloud. To these readers, she is Madeleine. In her struggles with temptation, in her existential affirmations of faith in the face of her husband's cancer and her own illness, in her attempts to understand her own life in the light of the biblical story, they recognize themselves.
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