Rejected by more than two dozen publishers in the early 1960s, A Wrinkle in Time was itself a work of its own time and entirely out of time—a sophisticated and original intellectual coming-of-age story featuring speculative science fiction, anti-Communist dystopia, and Christian hermeneutics. There had never been anything quite like it. And yet the wild success of the book didn’t help Madeleine L’Engle establish a reputation in literary circles. While these days a J. K. Rowling novel for adults is considered a significant publishing event, the opposite was true in L’Engle’s case. Though she wrote several impressive novels for adults in Wrinkle’s aftermath, particularly the complex and raw Love Letters from 1966, she was given short shrift because she was the author of children’s books—nor did her publisher think to use her success as a spur to sales in the wider market.
It’s worth remembering that when L’Engle wrote this book, children’s literature was considered a lowly thing in the precincts of American publishing and hardly worthy of note if your name were anything other than E. B. White. Consider the fact that at the same moment, Beverly Cleary was publishing books in her now-immortal series about ordinary middle-class children living on Klickitat Street in Portland, Oregon—and still had to labor to make a living by writing paperback novels for hire set in the (as we say now) Leave It to Beaver universe.
L’Engle was also concerned with questions of religious faith (Love Letters centers on the 18th-century Portuguese nun Mariana Alcoforado), which were, to put it mildly, of no interest among the cognoscenti. She was that rarest of Americans, a deeply serious and rigorously intellectual theological Episcopalian. She was also classically didactic, viewing her role as a tale-teller to children as an educative one (in the 1960s, she was an English teacher at a New York City private school). Mrs. Who, one of the three angels who help guide the children in A Wrinkle in Time, speaks almost entirely in quotations—from Goethe and Shakespeare and other giants of Western civilization whose names L’Engle might well have been introducing her young readers to.
All of this makes A Wrinkle in Time sound boring, and it is anything but. It’s a crazy salad of a book, anchored in its dissatisfied, wounded, angry, indelible 12-year-old heroine Meg Murry. Every female protagonist of a novel for teenagers that followed A Wrinkle in Time is a version of Meg, and for good reason. Her beloved prodigy of a brother wounds her by declaring she is “neither fish nor fowl.” L’Engle has us look at every aspect of this wild book—from speculative physics to life in a totalitarian state—through Meg’s frustrated, all-too-human eyes. And after all the grandeur, and the exploration of very abstract and advanced ideas, it is Meg who grasps and applies the simplest and most powerful rebuttal to all the fancy talk: love.
This is why A Wrinkle in Time went on to sell 10 million copies and will be in print as long as there is print. It is a book about science in which science is both joined with and humbled by the divine. More than any other children’s book—even the Narnia volumes—it is a novel of ideas. But it is a novel about how ideas are not enough.
You can mark the difference between L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and the $100 million Disney movie version of it with the fact that Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling) quotes not Goethe but Khalil Gibran; not Aristotle in the original Greek but Lin-Manuel Miranda; not Shakespeare but Maya Angelou. A lesson is being taught here by screenwriters Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell and director Ava DuVernay, but it’s not L’Engle’s lesson, which is about the transmission of high culture.
Conservative critics have already complained that the movie fails because it removes the Christianity and replaces it with a kind of female-empowerment agenda. It’s true this has happened, but that’s a reflection of the movie’s central problem, not its source. A Wrinkle in Time is literally a transcendental adventure story, and Lee, Stockwell, and DuVernay don’t seem to have a transcendental bone in their bodies.
Take the moment I remember vividly from the first time I read the book at the age of 9, when the idea of space travel across the fifth dimension is explained—not in words, but in a drawing that shows an ant crawling across a piece of wrinkled fabric. It was thrilling. The depiction of the wrinkle in time should be a natural for the movie, a highlight moment; but it takes place in the midst of a slideshow at a scientific conference and is not even shown in close-up. This playful, mind-expanding aspect of L’Engle’s book is lost entirely.
Still, the movie isn’t bad, which I expected it would be from the godawful trailers Disney made from it. That’s due in part to the inspired casting of a young actress named Storm Reid as Meg. She is perfect, which I can’t say for most of the performances here—save a turn by Zach Galifianakis that brings a needed bit of levity to the sagging middle of the movie.
In the end, A Wrinkle in Time is pretty faithful to everything about the book but its animating spirit and purpose. It’s more an illustrated and bowdlerized version of L’Engle than a violation. Watching it is akin to reading Tales from Shakespeare instead of Shakespeare itself. It’s easier.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic.
