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Choosing the Wedding
| Article
# : |
10779 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1993 |
2,290 Words |
| Author
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Gregory Wolfe
Gregory Wolfe is the founder and coeditor of Image: A Journal
of the Arts and Religion, and a frequent contributor to The
World & I. |
Madeleine L'Engle is best known for her fantasy novels for children, including A Wrinkle in Time, winner of the Newbery Award. These books have become so beloved by both children and adults that they often are compared to C.S. Lewis' classic Chronicles of Narnia. But over the years L'Engle has written in a wide variety of genres, from memoirs and poetry to meditations on the Bible and on the relationship between art and faith.
Certain Women, her latest novel, is one of the very few works of fiction she has written for adults. It gathers together, in a single fictional narrative, nearly all of the major themes and life experiences that have recurred in her writings. In this sense, Certain Women is an ambitious book, with the air of a summation, if not a valedictory. The novel has some wise and poignant things to say about death, the struggle in the human heart between hope and despair, and the nature of the human family. Certain Women, unfortunately, does not always achieve a consistently coherent and gripping narrative to successfully incarnate its major themes. But the novel represents an ambitious and daring attempt of a writer concerned with religious experience to reappropriate biblical narrative as relevant to our own time; this alone would make it worthy of our attention and respect.
L'Engle's wisdom though it can hardly be called reactionary, moves against the tide of the major currents in our secularized and politicized culture. In a quietly insistent way, Certain Women suggests that the answers to some of our most pressing social and psychic problems are to be found in religious faith and in a humane understanding of the real and abiding differences between men and women. Some of the early reviews of the novels were critical not only of its literary flaws but also of L'Engle's offenses against political correctness. There is something ironic about this sort of ideological censorship, given the care L'Engle takes in the novel to come to grips with what have been termed "women's issues."
The way women endure and heal
L'Engle's title comes from a passage in the gospel of Luke: "Certain women made us astonished." The context of the passage is immediately after Christ's resurrection, when some of the women followers of Jesus found His tomb empty. Of course, the news these women brought the disciples was astonishing in itself. But it is worth noting that the women--including, as tradition would have it, Mary Magdalene discovered the news precisely because they were at the tomb praying and mourning, manifesting
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