Shelf Discovery

by Lizzie Skurnick

  But, starting with books like Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen or Lois Duncan’s When the Bough Breaks, we started to see an entirely new animal—books that dealt with the lives and dramas of adolescent girls on their own terms, in their own worlds. There was, of course, Judy Blume’s whole oeuvre, which took us from getting our periods to losing our virginity, and also Lois Duncan’s, which put a supernatural twist on the family dynamic. Writers like Katherine Paterson or Robert Cormier had novels with an adult’s level of complexity in the inner worlds of the protagonists, and Paul Zindel’s mordant, funny books about the lives of the teens of Bayonne and Staten Island were a window into an unusual world, to say the least. (Well, not that unusual for ME. I was raised in Jersey.) There were Scott O’Dell’s historical novels of brave girls left alone on islands, Paula Danziger’s laser-like dissection of high schools and camps, Norma Klein’s blasé, sexually active NY sophisticates, Madeline L’Engle’s three stunning heroines—Meg, Vicky, and Polly (you could write an entire book just on L’Engle’s heroines!)—girls in the center of their own adventures.

  But it wasn’t only that the books were about teens living, quote unquote, today. It was that these books treated us as adults, capable of understanding complex issues, of appreciating complicated plots, of getting sophisticated jokes—of being funny and smart, ourselves. These weren’t classics tailor-made for Cliffs Notes, and they weren’t the adult books deemed mild and metaphorical enough to still be safe for children. (Seriously, though—when will administrators start noticing that gay sex scene in The Great Gatsby?) Whatever complex strains of melancholy, whatever deep reservoirs of mordant humor, whatever sophisticated irony I had found in the books I plucked off my parents’ shelves—here they were in books for teens too, in guises both serious and shallow.

  When I first started doing reviews of classic young adult literature for Jezebel’s Fine Lines column, I was amused and surprised by the odd, visceral details that returned to me with every work: Pa bringing the girls real white sugar wrapped in brown paper in Little House in the Big Woods, Sally J. Freeman having a man-o’-war wrapped around her foot (who even knew what a man-o’-war was?), Claudia choosing macaroni at the Automat in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. These strong, charged images that have never left me—they’re often even stronger than memories I have of my own life. I simply see the cover, and they come back—like fragments of a dream I can’t quite remember, Proust’s madeleine, but even stranger, since I’ve never even tasted one.

  Some of the lives I read about were very similar to mine (I could see a lot of my own camp life in There’s a Bat in Bunk Five, minus the cute boyfriend, natch), and some couldn’t be more different (despite my best efforts, I have yet to achieve psychic synergy with a dolphin). But it wasn’t about finding myself—or not finding myself—in the circumstances of a girl’s life, as much as I might be fascinated by it. It was about seeing myself—and my friends and enemies—in the actual girl.

  It might have begun with the covers. Most were either snapshots or looked like soft paintings of snapshots (whither, whither the painted cover?), with girls who were neither goodlooking nor not-good-looking, girls in glasses, with braces, standing in front of the mirror or smiling happily in the arms of a boy, glowering in front of a locker, standing with bonnet and hoop skirt on a lonely plane, girls with head, feet, and body miraculously intact. There they were, waiting like very large dolls for the tug on the string that would start them moving and speaking.

  In them I found a window, a scrying glass, into a complex consciousness, a life like my own, but writ large in all of its messy ambiguity. Nothing, as of yet, had happened to me. But there was the world, and everything happening in it, right in the bright row of spines. It was waiting for me to pull out its next chapter, to turn the book over, to open the first page and read.

  Chapter 1

  Still Checked Out

  YA Heroines We’ll Never Return

  Mom…Can Sally J. Sleep Over?

  If you ask me, it is truly a symbol of the great injustice of life as we know it today that the only girl heroine’s name that can truly be said to have entered the vernacular is “Pollyanna.” (I mean, have you even read Pollyanna? I may have made it through about 10 minutes of the movie—that is, if I’m not confusing it with Heidi.) It’s an even greater injustice that the appellative, of course, is a pejorative. It’s not only that, out of the 9,000 exciting heroines you could mention, our language reflects only one. It’s that the one character elected for immortality, the linguistic ambassador for young women in the world, is a prating goody-goody who spreads her good cheer with the relentless force of a Caterpillar.

  If I had my way, we would add some other options to the mix. What, for example, about being a Ramona? (Inquisitive, inspired, unaccountably amusing.) A Meg? (Stubborn, brainy, admirably self-questioning.) A Claudia! (Exquisitely tasteful, stylized, demanding—the Michael Kors of the under–12 set.) A Wifey! (Sorry, wrong chapter.) A Margaret! (Still Chapter Two.)

  But you get my point. Just as there are certain books we drag with us to bed year after year like a beloved, worn blanket, there are certain heroines we find continually in circulation, like especially festive members of a slumber-party circuit. (Ramona! Are you putting toothpaste in the sink again?)

  And why do they continue to receive our coveted Saturday-night invitations? Well, first, they are marvelously fun to be around. (See above: Toothpaste.) They also teach us new things, like what an Automat is, or what’s a charming, off-the-beaten-track place you might want to consider when you next run away. (Here’s a hint: Admission is only what you can give!) They remind us of ourselves—Meg’s glumness over her awkward stage comes to mind—even as they perform galactic feats of travel that challenge our 8-year-old grasp of algebra. (You had me at “square the square.”) They have annoying brothers, worried mothers, and affectionate fathers—even doting bubehs—and while they see themselves in the mirror, we can see ourselves in their Margaret O’Brien coronet.

  And they challenge us, like the best of friends, in general—not only to be ourselves, but to be more interesting, inspired versions of ourselves, girls unafraid to squeeze toothpaste, sleep on a Louis XIV bed or keep important tabs on all the neighbors, even if they’re not afraid they’re Hitler. (Yes, Sally—but you didn’t think I’d forget Harriet, did you?) In search of their constant company, I’m sure the nerdier among us will be happy to cop to the occasional commemorative costume, poem, or diorama or website. This is nonsense; we owe our best friends a durable immortality. Next stop: Let’s get them into the lexicon.

  BOOK REPORT

  A Wrinkle in Time

  By Madeleine L’Engle 1962

  The Great Brain

  It was a dark and stormy night.

  If I had my way, none of us would have to read this essay at all. Instead, we’d join hands, hear a great thunderclap, and be whisked off to a rambling house in the country, where we’d view odd things bubbling in a lab with a stone floor, consume hot cocoa, jam on bread, and liverwurst-and-cream-cheese sandwiches at the kitchen table while swinging our legs, and then sidestep for a moment onto a planet inhabited by gentle gray creatures with dents for eyes. We would be inserted into some mitochondria, battle for the soul of Madoc/Maddox, and eat crayfish with our lesbian kind-of aunt who insisted on calling us our full name (Polyhymnia). We’d hop on a freighter and solve a mystery, then go to boarding school in Switzerland. We would make a brief detour on the Upper West Side and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine by way of Portugal, and be concerned with cell regeneration in starfish. We’d be smacked on the ass by a dolphin. We’d try to answer the questions of God, sex, and the galaxy, and if the principal ever tried to get us to come back to school, why, we’d drag him along with us, too.

  God, how much it kills me that we can’t do those things! (Especially the dolphin part.) But, as A Wrinkle in Time’s opaque Mrs. Who would have us recall, Dante said, Come t’e picciol fallow amaro morso. (�
��What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!”) Alas, it will have to be enough for us to spend a bit of time in the company of a most short-fused, half-cocked, bespectacled literary heroine—Meg Murry, the first heroine to endear herself to the reader by way of atom rearrangement.

  Meg Murry—brilliant at math, poor at geography, eschewing rumination for action—is the first in a line of L’Engle heroines who flit across the boundaries of space and time, even more flummoxed by adolescence than they are by being whip-sawed across the universe. (Which they are, generally, just to complicate things, in the process of saving.) In A Wrinkle in Time, Meg, joined by her neighbor Calvin O’Keefe and her quietly remarkable younger brother Charles Wallace, hop-stops her way through a number of only occasionally hospitable galaxies, searching for her father in the shadow of the Dark Thing, the shadow of evil threatening to overtake Earth, and all of creation.

  And that’s it for those of you who haven’t read the book. (Just stab me in the eye; it’s less painful.) For the rest, first off, I am embarrassed to say that, swooning over memories of red-tinged Sloppy Joe brains and calm, fragrant creatures with dents for eyes (Aunt Beast!), I had entirely forgotten that, when we first come across the studious, brilliant Murry family, they—and Meg in particular—are in somewhat of a crisis. Their father has been missing for some months, a fact that the town’s citizens are only too happy to snidely snicker over. Long scorned for their elite, egghead predilections (Dr. Murry, a physicist, is an advisor to the president) the Murry family is finally in a position where the town can feel superior to them.

  Meg has responded to this with admirable intemperance—namely, slugging a boy who’s just called Charles Wallace her “dumb baby brother.” Charles Wallace, of course, is anything but—he’s a polymath whose exquisite intellect also makes him highly attuned to those around him, particularly Meg, whose fury Charles Wallace sympathizes with, but only because he knows it hurts Meg more than anyone else. This is more than we can say for Mr. Jenkins, the principal, who will be brought down in a later sequel but is now just being kind of an ass:

  “Meg, don’t you think you’d make a better adjustment to life if you faced facts?”

  “I do face facts,” Meg said. “They’re lots easier to face than people, I can tell you.”

  “Then why don’t you face facts about your father?”

  “You leave my father out of it!” Meg shouted.

  “Stop bellowing,” Mr. Jenkins said sharply. “Do you want the entire school to hear you?”

  “So what?” Meg demanded. “I’m not ashamed of anything I’m saying. Are you?”

  Unfortunately for Meg, as in the case of so many of the outwardly belligerent, a propensity for bellowing hides a healthy case of “I hate myself and would like to die.” Still outraged by the boys’ insults, alone in the bathroom, Meg tells her cat, “Just be glad you’re a kitten and not a monster like me.”

  The problem for Meg is that, while she’s well able to see the truth about others, good or bad, she has a miserable lack of insight into herself. Worse yet, she is surrounded by people who know exactly who they are. Her younger twin brothers, alone among the Murrys, manage to fit in: “The twins didn’t have any problems…. They were strong and fast runners and good at games, and when cracks were made about anybody in the Murry family, they weren’t made about Sandy and Dennys.” Then there’s her mother, who’s beautiful, kind, and a brilliant scientist. (Meg snorts at the idea that her mother’s looks or accomplishments are ordinary, although her mother, also enragingly modest, assures her they are.)

  Youngest brother Charles Wallace may have issues on the vast social stage of their country town (“Thinking I’m a moron gives people something to be smug about”), but only because being brilliant, psychic, and self-assured before reaching five feet never plays well on the playground. (FYI, Charles Wallace is the only preternaturally wise child I’ve ever been able to stand, in literature. Maybe that’s why I can’t stand the other ones—they’re NOT Charles Wallace.) Even their neighbor Calvin O’Keefe, whom Meg thinks of only as a popular, well-adjusted basketball player, only pretends to be standard-issue—he, like Charles, is both bright and highly attuned to unseen currents.

  Meg, on the other hand, is all flyaway hair, braces, irritation, and uncertainty—not ordinary enough to be popular in school, but not quite the extraordinary being Charles Wallace is. (As Charles Wallace puts it, “Meg has it tough. She’s not really one thing or the other.”) When she hears someone say, “The two boys seem to be nice, regular children, but that unattractive girl and the baby boy certainly aren’t all there,” there’s no more coherent rejoinder than her flying fists.

  But Calvin O’Keefe, whose unabashed affection for Meg marks the beginning of her transformation, dispatches this whole line of inquiry neatly. “Oh, for crying out loud,” Calvin said, “you’re Meg, aren’t you? Come on and let’s go for a walk.”

  I’m sorry. I’m going to need to just swoon for one second over Calvin:

  Tall he certainly was, and skinny. His bony wrists stuck out of the sleeves of his blue sweater; his worn corduroy trousers were three inches too short. He had orange hair that needed cutting and the appropriate freckles to go with it. His eyes were an oddly bright blue.

  Loving. Him. LOVING HIM. (You Poly and Vicky girls can keep your Zachary Grays and Adam Eddingtons.) Anyway, enough backstory. As you know, Calvin has been brought on the scene at the request of Mrs. Who, one of three mysterious old women who have arrived in order to help the Murrys retrieve their father, who, as the family knows perfectly, has not gone on the lam with a beautiful woman, but has, obviously, been stuck in a high-tech jail on a galaxy far, far away.

  But in order to spring him loose, they are going to have to perform the act that landed Professor Murry in trouble in the first place—engaging in a tesseract. (Is the tesseract the object or action? Whatever.) As Mrs. Whatsit unhelpfully explains, “Oh, we don’t travel at the speed of anything…. We tesser. Or you might say, we wrinkle.”

  I’m going to need some visuals on that! (Readers who always skipped over the technical points in L’Engle: you might want to commence skipping now.) Okay, imagine an ant crawling on a piece of string. Now, imagine the string is a skirt! Oh, whatever, just listen to Mrs. Whatsit:

  Swiftly Mrs. Who brought her hands, still holding the skirt, together. “Now, you see,” Mrs. Whatsit said. “He would be there, without that long trip.

  That is how we travel.”

  Exactly! Sort of. I have always been grateful to L’Engle for the next section, which helped me pass fourth-grade geometry. Charles Wallace begins to quiz Meg on dimensions, taking her through the first dimension (a line), the second (a square), the third (a three-dimensional square, in which we live), then what’s the fourth:

  “Well, I guess if you want to put it into mathematical terms you’d square the square. But you can’t take a pencil and draw it the way you can the first three. I know it’s got something to do with Einstein and time. I guess maybe you can call the fourth dimension Time.”

  That great whooshing sound you hear is the noise of 10 million readers deciding to just go ahead and be English majors. In any case, having tesseracted, fourth-dimension style, Meg’s father is not simply lost—he is imprisoned by the great brain of the Dark Thing, a shadow stretching over the entire universe that is also starting to creep over Earth, cloaking it in evil and despair.

  In order to release him, the children are going to have to travel first to a lovely planet where Aunt Beast, part of a lovely race of eyeless, psychic, agreeably beast-y creatures, serves as their protector, then to Camazotz, where Dr. Murry is being held, a planet where the forces of evil have coalesced into a dreadful reign of conformity:

  Then the doors of all the houses opened simultaneously, and out came women like a row of paper dolls. The print of their dresses was different, but they all gave the appearance of being the same. Each woman stood on the steps of her house. Each clapped. Each child with the
ball caught the ball. Each child with the skipping rope folded the rope. Each child turned and walked into the house. The doors clicked shut behind them.

  Just as in Meg’s small hometown, conformity alone is the face of evil, and knowledge—individual, eccentric knowledge—is a force of good.

  This is a grand theme in L’Engle overall, but we see it in full force in the first few chapters of the book, where the reader is introduced, in no particular order, to E=mc2, megaparsecs, Peru, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Euripides, Delille, and a host of other terms with which your presumably middle-grade reader is rarely familiar. Even as the children watch the Dark Thing encircle their planet, they are comforted when Mrs. Whatsit tells them that there have been heroes fighting against it throughout history—not swashbucklers with laser guns, but saviors such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Pasteur, and Madame Curie and Einstein, and, for the purists among you, Jesus.

  But, if the saviors of Creation are creative thinkers, it’s no surprise that the forces of evil are embodied in a large, red-tinged brain, IT—one whose droning repetition seeks to draw all comers into its Maoist haze. Meg resists its overwhelming pull first by reciting the periodic table, then the square roots of odd numbers (get it—odd!), and finally, when Charles Wallace is pulled into the great brain, appropriately enough, the Declaration of Independence: