Nom de Plume

More than any other writer, Madeleine L’Engle was a constant presence in my life as a child. From A Wrinkle in Time through to her books for teenagers, and then her adult books as an older teen, I worshipped every word she wrote. Her strong sense of right and wrong meant a lot to me back then. Further, it’s not inaccurate to say that the opinions she influenced back then still inform my own sense of morality today.

Thus, in a fit of nostalgia, I just went back and reread all the Austin family books. I enjoyed them–less because of their content and more because of the sense of my childhood they invoked. I had to squelch a growing feeling that, were I to meet the Austin family, I would find them, well, prigs. I managed to suppress it. And then I read A Live Coal in the Sea. All my misgivings about the Austins flared back.

You see, A Live Coal is the Sea is crap.

The problem is that those very things that made her children’s books so wonderful–that strong sense of morality, the simplified explanations of complex human emotions–come across in her adult novels as nothing more than innocent stupidity. All her characters are essentially the same, the L’Engle archetype, if you will. They are all, in her own words, “unpardonably naive.” (In my words, they just need to be bashed over the head with a frying pan.) Even when she tries to be shocking (like the priest father-in-law being bent over and boffed by the organist), it doesn’t work. One simply cringes. It is as if her writing never quite matured past the age of 16.

I am so disappointed. It makes me wonder about the wisdom of rereading novels one loved as a child; some things, after all, are better left alone.