I loved the Wrinkle in Time books when I was a kid, and then as a teenager, I was thrilled to discover that L’Engle had also written books for young adults, and I happily devoured those as well. So when I saw this short story collection in the new books display of my college’s library, I grabbed it, thinking that it would be fun to revisit her work (and that short stories would be good for my limited attention span at the end of the semester). And it was! She’s such a sharp, surprising writer — there’s something really mesmerizing to me about her characters, who tend to be both prickly and fiercely independent but also sort of melodramatic and wounded.
It’s weird how uncomfortable I feel opining about the short story as a form. Every time, I find myself on the verge of saying, “I don’t read short stories that often,” and sure, it’s true that I read novels more, but it’s not like I never read short stories. It’s true that I rarely buy short story collections, and I really don’t know why. I think I feel some measure of weariness with “linked” short story collections (just write the novel. Actually, isn’t this really just a novel?), but I have also been proclaiming how much I love short novels, so why in the hell don’t I read more short stories?
Anyways, what’s neat about these stories is that they all seem to be exactly the right size — there’s a rightness to their length and the portion of life they’ve carved out. This is notable, because many of them actually juxtapose shorter moments and longer spans of time — very few are just one scene, or even framed by one. But there’s a sort of tidiness to them, where you think, yes, that was the perfect amount.
This collection is also interesting because it’s from a longer arc of her career, arranged roughly chronologically, and you really can see a gradual development in her writing style (plus, there are two oddball sci-fi stories). The early stories were written for creative writing classes at Smith College (and they’re strikingly mature for such a young writer), and I was going to say that they all seem like they could be Salinger imitations, but then I asked Google and found out that Salinger’s books weren’t published until the 50s! He did publish a lot of short stories in the 40s, but L’Engle was writing these at the end of the 30s. I wonder if there’s something about the US milieu of WWII and its aftermath that I’m seizing on? It just feels like these early stories are doing a thing, one that I’ve seen other writers do as well.
Anyways. The stories become more interesting, and more emotionally complex, as the collection continues. There’s one about a man called home to help his sister care for their aging parents that will haunt me for a long time, I think. L’Engle has a really remarkable ability to examine human emotion while maintaining a sense of opacity. It’s not the cold detachment of so many contemporary authors (that I also love); it’s more like a respect for capriciousness and irrationality, and a willingness to really engage with selfishness and indifference.
Maybe this is why these stories feel so personal to me, such that I feel no inclination to recommend them to others, even though I really enjoyed them. It’s not that I think you have to have been a L’Engle fan as a young person, or anything like that. It’s that they’re so nakedly about people’s feelings, but without any real interest in making larger abstract claims about the human condition. Their minimalism registers as simplicity, but in a non-demonstrative way. They are not remarkable, and that’s exactly what I liked about them.
Kasia Reads 