Madeleine L’Engle, a fixture in the lives of generations of American children and teenagers as the author of the classic novel A Wrinkle in Time, looked back on the 1950s as her “decade of failure.” After finding critical success in the 1940s with fiction for both young readers and adults, she had a run of persistent bad luck. One novel went unpublished; the next found a home only after years of effort. She and her husband had moved from New York City to run a general store in rural Connecticut, where many knew her simply as “the grocer’s wife.” After she received a rejection letter for another book on her fortieth birthday, in 1958, she wondered if she ought to give up writing and focus on being a housewife and mother to her three children: “Stop this foolishness and learn to make cherry pie,” she told herself. A practicing Christian who was active in the local Congregational church, she also had begun to struggle with her faith.
During the summer of 1959, L’Engle and her family embarked on a cross-country road trip. At night, after the children had gone to bed, she read books of higher math and physics by flashlight. As she recalled in “How Long Is a Book?,” a lecture from the early 1970s that is included in the second volume of the Library of America’s recent collection of her writings, she was seeking a light in the dark: “Not just to learn the various theories of the creation of the universe, the theories of relativity, of quantum [mechanics], but because in the writing of Sir James Jeans, of Einstein, Planck, I got a vision of a universe in which I could believe in God.” In the work of scientists and mathematicians, she continued, she found “a reverence for the beauty and pattern of the universe, for the mystery of the heavenly laws which argued much more convincingly to me of a loving creator than did the German theologians.” Driving through the Painted Desert in Arizona—an environment “as much out of this world as any of the planets” she later imagined in her fiction—she turned to the children and announced that she was going to write a new novel about three characters whose names had just come to her: Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which. (L’Engle deliberately left off the period after the “Mrs” in their names, to emphasize that they were “extra-special as well as extra-terrestrial.”)
Law school sharpened my mind—and my writing. I was taught to think in terms of logic, to break down every argument into its component pieces, and to reinforce them with the necessary evidence. And truthfully, I relished it. I vividly remember the high of hammering out 21-page long papers in my 3-hour final exams. I did well at it, because that year had molded me into a ruthlessly logical, analytical thinker and writer.
But as it sharpened, my mind lost some of its softness, the ability to put words together in a way that was fluid, emotional, visceral. I could churn out countless facts and arguments, but I had lost sight of stories and sentiments. For years afterwards, when I tried to flex my creative muscles, it felt like my brain was in a vise: numb and stripped of feeling. For so long, I couldn’t write a poem—an impulse that had flowed freely until then.
I call them “this thing is late capitalism” essays. There are several variations on this genre of lifestyle writing. They don’t always invoke the “late capitalism” phrase explicitly, but all offer a critique of a popular brand or product in terms of its relationship to the system. Some are formulated as takedowns of companies that market themselves as millennial-friendly, or environmentally focused or, most often, feminist. In these essays, a writer will explain that, while this brand claims to be offering you empowerment, it is selling you a product at the end of the day: the enlightened brand is actually capitalist, but you might be fooled into thinking otherwise. Another type is the one in which writers chronicle their journey as they use a selection of hip, socially conscious products for a week, ultimately finding that, although these products promised to improve their life, it has, disappointingly, remained the same. Even the fanciest things cannot make you a better version of yourself, the writer will conclude, but it’s easy to be conned into thinking they might. Finally, there are the essays that credulously profile a company seeking to make a statement about, or better still, “shake up” capitalism.
Still, there is real poignancy in this novel, as wounded characters struggle to regain childhood loyalties. Ward nails how family expeditions are ruined and saved, over and over again, by fleeting moments of connection and the consensus to survive without killing one another.
Many progressives hold these truths to be virtually self-evident. The United States Supreme Court has the hallowed role of protecting the most vulnerable in society. At a minimum, it does not engage in judicial activism to burden them further. And only now, when the court has shifted decisively to the right, is it in danger of relinquishing that function.
Adam Cohen’s “Supreme Inequality” shows that these beliefs utterly fail to capture the court’s treatment of the poor. For 50 years, he explains, it has exacerbated economic inequality through its aggressive jurisprudence.
Cathy Park Hong’s latest book, asks readers to be open to nuance and hold two sometimes contradictory notions simultaneously. The Los Angeles-born writer details the peculiarities of identifying as Asian American—a term stretched to encompass a broad swath of people whose ancestors emigrated from the same continent. As Hong makes clear, religion, creed, custom, and even privilege in the United States aren’t binding factors among this group of people.
What can we offer the child
at the border: a river of shoes,