The Books: Moon by Night (Madeleine L’Engle)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books

Next book on the shelf is The Moon by Night by Madeleine L’Engle.

This is the second book in the Austin Family series. The book opens with Mr. Austin announcing to the family that he has been offered a great job in a hospital in New York City – and so the entire family is going to re-locate there. They are country kids, living in a farmhouse – so it’s all gonna be a big change. But before they move to Manhattan – they’ve decided to take the summer off, and drive across country. Sort of a way to transition their lives. So they pack up the station wagon – they’re going to go camping – see all the national parks, visit family in Oklahoma, in California … and when the summer is done, they will fly back – and start up their new lives in New York City.

Big changes for the Austin Family!! Vicky is 14 years old and is deeply into her awkward introspective difficult teenage years … she’s not interested in hanging out with the family all the time, she needs time “to herself” – to write poetry, and think, and have her own experiences – but of course because she’s 14 she’s kind of obnoxious about it. She doesn’t want to be a little girl anymore – but her parents are insistent that this is a family trip – and they have to do things as a FAMILY. (Hmmm. I am thinking of the O’Malleys in Ireland when I refused to get out of the car to go see yet another monastery!)

So they drive across the country. At one of the campsites – a rich family sets up camp beside them – the Austins are vaguely judgmental towards them and their hoity toity camping equipment that they don’t know how to use. There is a son in this family – who will become hugely important not only in this book but in MANY other books L’Engle writes. He crosses over between the Austin Family series and the Murry Family series – he’s a major character in both. Obviously L’Engle found him fascinating enough to keep him going through multiple books. He is a great character – troubled, annoying, complex, devious, contrite – His name is Zachary. He’s a rich kid – he’s about 16 years old. His parents kind of ignore him – he’s a troubled person so he’s shuffled off to boarding schools, because no one knows what to do with him. He’s a know-it-all. He wrote the book on “been there, seen it”. Nothing can surprise him. There’s something cynical and corrupt about him. And yet – on a dime – all of that can collapse, and suddenly all of his sadness comes out, he knows he’s a fuck-up, he wishes he could change … he’s lonely, he’s sad … Also, let’s just admit it: He (apparently) is gorgeous. From L’Engle’s descriptions, he sounds like Peter Gallagher. THAT kind of good-looking. Black hair, pale skin, black eyebrows – a sharp intelligent face – he’s got charisma. Oh, and let’s just add this to it: He also has rheumatic fever. He’s not well. He gets out of breath doing the simplest things – which totally sets him apart from the jocky atmosphere of boarding schools – He can’t be an athlete because of his illness.

All of this comes out slowly over Moon by Night – because basically Zachary befriends Vicky – she finds him unlike anyone she has ever met, and even though she hates his cynicism – they end up going for walks together, and arguing about things – the 2 families keep meeting up at different campsites. At first it seems coincidental, but then it becomes clear that Zachary is making his parents follow the Austins and go wherever the Austins go. Mr. and Mrs. Austin are not wacky about this new friend of Vicky’s. Actually nobody is. Nobody likes Zachary. But Vicky is sort of dazzled by his interest in her … by the fact that he has chosen her … also by the fact that she has never met anyone like him before. But Zachary ends up causing all KINDS of trouble – Mr. and Mrs. Austin want Vicky to spend all her time with the family. Vicky rebels. She wants to hang out with Zachary – even though his cynicism drives her insane. She wants Zachary to just accept that people are GOOD, that there is a possibliity for GOODNESS on this earth – it becomes one of her missions.

Everything comes to a head when they are in California. The Austins are staying with Uncle Douglas – a beloved uncle, who’s a painter. Zachary and his family are nearby, I believe – and Zachary ends up taking Vicky out on a date to see a play of The Diary of Anne Frank. And Vicky ends up having a soul-crisis watching that play. She can barely speak of what is happening inside her – and Zachary can’t really understand (want to be clear that there is a strange sort of sweetness to Zachary) – she is having a crisis of faith, basically is what has happened.

Her family interprets this “crisis of faith” in the same way they interpreted her sulking fits, or her tantrums. “Oh, that’s just Vicky being Vicky.” Rolling their eyes. L’Engle SO gets that adolescent moment – the moment when you need to separate yourself from your family – and try to work things out on your own. And even if your family loves you – they probably won’t like it that you have separated yourself from them – but that’s part of life. Vicky can’t talk to her family about what the Anne Frank play meant to her – she can barely be with it herself – so Uncle Douglas steps up to the plate – and the conversation that he has with Vicky is the excerpt I’ve chosen for the book.

It may sound preachy to some ears, but it doesn’t to mine. Messages like this were ESSENTIAL for me when I was 14 years old and very much like Vicky.

And later in the book – when a REAL crisis comes up – Vicky harkens back to this conversation withi Uncle Douglas – it gives her the strength to meet the challenges in front of her.

I love this book. L’Engle takes teenagers seriously. L’Engle knows that any person worthy of the name “human being” will probably ask the question at some point in their lives – “Why did Anne Frank have to die?” – and she takes that moment seriously. And if you think there’s an easy and certain answer to that question? Then you do not understand sensitive teenagers and it’s a good thing that YOU’RE not writing young adult novels for them. I worked through my own rage about Anne Frank while reading this book.

Excerpt from The Moon by Night by Madeleine L’Engle

Uncle Douglas came into the room where I was lying on the bed, not reading or anything, just lying there. Vicky’s moping again, Suzy would say. “How about letting me do a few sketches of you, Vicky? Come on into the studio.”

I sat with my arms on the back of a chair and my head down on my arms and Uncle Douglas began sketching me. I don’t know how long it was with me just sitting and Uncle Douglas working before he said, “What’s up, Vicky?”

I shrugged. When I shrug it infuriates the family, but Uncle Douglas doesn’t get enough of it to have it bother him. We don’t see him that often, and when we do I’m usually at my best instead of my worst. This was his first real dose of what I suppose you’d call my worst.

He asked, very gently, “Want to tell me about it, Vic?”

“I want to,” I said. “But I don’t think I can.”

“Try.”

“If I try it’ll just sound dopey. I mean, I know everybody thinks it’s something that happened with Zachary. But it isn’t that. It’s sort of everything. Uncle Douglas, why did Anne Frank have to die?”

“Because the Nazis put her in a concentration camp,” he answered in a reasonable way.

“But it wasn’t right.”

“No. It was terribly wrong. But it happened.”

“But it wasn’t fair!”

Uncle Douglas just nodded slowly, as though to himself, and went on sketching me. Finally he said, “It’s a bit of a shock, isn’t it, when you realize that things aren’t fair in life? It comes particularly hard to you, Vicky, because your parents are eminently fair. IT comes hard because of your grandfather. But it was your grandfather who once recited a little poem to me. Want to hear it?”

“Sure,” I said without much enthusiasm. I expected something religious and comforting, and the whole point was that the comforting things were what scared me most, because Zachary was right; they didn’t make sense.

“The rain is raining all around,”

Uncle Douglas quoted,

“It rains on both the just and the unjust fellow.
But more, it seems on the just than on the unjust,
For the unjust hath the just’s umbrella.

All I’m trying to get at, Vicky, is that life isn’t fair, and your grandfather, who is one of the greatest human beings I’ve ever known, is quite aware of it. He doesn’t have anything to do with pie in the sky.” (Pie in the sky again. It almost sounded as though Uncle Douglas could read people’s minds.) “Your grandfather knows that the wicked flourish and the innocent suffer. But it doesn’t destroy him, Vicky. He still believes, with a wonderful and certain calm, that God is our kind and loving father.”

“But how can he!” I cried. “If God lets things be unfair, if He lets things like Anne Frank happen, then I don’t love Him, I hate Him!”

Uncle Douglas didn’t look shocked. He just looked thoughtful. “Tilt your head a little to the right, Vicky. That’s better. Hold it.” Then he said, “I guess you know I’m the heathen of the family.”

“You’re not a heathen.”

“Thanks, dear. Happily your grandfather doesn’t think so, either. Nor that I’m a heretic, bless him, though I have some pretty unorthodox ideas. I get mad at God, too, Vicky. I’ve gone out alone and bellowed in rage at God at the top of my lungs. But the fact that I bellow at him I suppose proves that I think he’s there, doesn’t it? Go ahead and be mad at God if you feel like it, Vicky. I happen to agree with your grandfather that the greatest sin against God is indifference. But remember when you’re yelling at God, what you’re doing is saying, Do it MY way, God, not YOUR way, MY way.”

“How can things like Anne Frank be God’s way? I don’t want God if things like that are His way. It’s a cockeyed kind of way. Look at Maggy. Both her mother and father died and she was too young. And the most cockeyed part of it is that she’s probably turned out a much nicer kid than if they hadn’t died the way she was being brought up and everything. Does that make sense? It’s crazy. What kind of a God does things like that!”

“Do you mind if I give you a little lecture?” Uncle Douglas asked. “Your mother says that you’ve been very resistant to parental preaching lately. Do you mind a little avuncular philosophy?”

“Go ahead,” I said stiffly.

“As I told you, sweetheart, I’m the heathen of the family. This is nothing to be proud of. It’s just a fact we have to face. But if you go on the assumption – and I do – that man has freedom of choice, then you have to assume responsibility for your own actions. You can’t go on passing the buck to God.” I must have looked blank, because Uncle Douglas wriggled his eyebrows. “How can I explain it to you? Look, Vicky, you remember your bike accident, don’t you?”

“How could I forget it?”

“Why did you have the accident? Because you exercised freedom of choicde to do something you knew perfectly well you oughtn’t to do. When you went on the back road in the dark you did wrong and you knew you were doing wrong, and when you were in the hospital afterwards, you didn’t whine around saying why did God do this to me? You accepted the responsibility for your own actions.”

“But Anne Frank didn’t do anything wrong. She didn’t do anything to put her in a concentration camp.”

“When you had your bike accident do you think you were the only one who suffered? Everyone in your family was hurt. And what you had done was not so terribly wrong, after all. But when the Germans set up concentration camps that was a very big wrong, and certainly many millions of people suffered because of it. Man exercised the freedom of choice to do wrong, and innocent people paid for it, but I don’t think you can go around blaming God for it.”

“He could have stopped it,” I said stubbornly.

“IF he interferes every time we do wrong where’s our freedom of choice?”

“But it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.” I persisted.

Uncle Douglas sighed. For a while he worked on his sketch of me. Then he sighed and said, “One of the biggest facts you have to face, Vicky, is that if there is a God he’s infinite, and we’re finite, and therefore we can’t ever understand him. The minute anybody starts telling you what God thinks, or exactly why he does such and such, beware. People should never try to make God in man’s image, and that’s what they’re constantly doing. Not your grandfather. But he’s extraordinary. So in my heathen way, Vicky, when I wasn’t much older than you, I decided that God, a kind and loving God, could never be proved. In fact there are, as you’ve been seeing lately, a lot of arguments against him. But there isn’t any point to life without him. Without him we’re just a skin disease on the face of the earth, and I feel too strongly about the human spirit to be able to settle for that. So what I did for a long time was to live life as though I believed in God. And eventually I found out that the as though had turned into a reality. I think the thing that did it for me was a jigsaw puzzle.”

“A jigsaw puzzle?”

“A jigsaw puzzle. Hold still. Chin a little higher. You know those puzzles with hundreds of tiny pieces? YOu take one of those pieces by itself and it doesn’t make sense, does it? You look at one piece and it doesn’t even seem to be part of a picture. But you put all the pieces together and you see the meaning of it all. Well, what I, in my heathenish way, Vicky, feel about life, and unfairness, is that we find it hard to realize that there is a completed puzzle. We jump to conclusions and decide that the one little piece we have in our hand is all there is and it doesn’t make sense. We find it almost impossible to think about infinity, much less comprehend it. But life only makes sense if you see it in infinite terms. If the one piece of the puzzle that is this life were all, then everything wouold be horrible and unfair and I wouldn’t want much to do with God, either. But there are all the other pieces, too, the pieces that make up the whole picture. Now I’m just going to slap some water color on this. Can you hold it a while longer? Maybe when I’m done I’ll cut it up into tiny pieces and put them in an envelope and give them to you to fit together. So you can find out what Vicky is. The jigsaw puzzle is a nice, stretchable metaphor. You can use it for almost anything. Now let’s stop talking abstractions and get down to specifics. Did Zachary do anything to you that he shouldn’t have done?”

I started to shake my head, then remembered that Uncle Douglas was painting me. “You mean did he make out too much and stuff?”

“And stuff,” Uncle Douglas said.

“No stuff,” I said. I don’t know why I wasn’t furious with Uncle Douglas. I would have been if it had been Mother or Daddy.

“Then …” he left it up in the air.

“You guessed it,” I said. “It was all the stuff you were talking about. Did Daddy tell you about Zachary’s rheumatic fever and his heart and all?”

“Yes.”

“Does Daddy think Zachary’s going to die?”

“Why don’t you ask him? Your father hasn’t examined Zachary, so he can’t really tell. But, he says, on a superficial guess, it looks more as though Zachary were trying to kill himself than as though he really had to die young. I don’t honestly think he’s a very healthy person for you to see, Vicky.”

“Nobody likes him,” I said bitterly. “Nobody’s even bothered to know him.”

“You like him?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’re not trying to interfere, Vicky. And we’re not trying to keep you from growing up. We’d just like to try to make it as easy as possible, because we love you.”

“But you said that nothing that was worth anything was easy.”

“Touche. But it doesn’t need to be quite as difficult as you can make it if you insist on going at it completely alone. After all, the only way man has gone as far as he has is by benefitting from other people’s experience.”

Aunt Elena’d finally switched from her finger exercises which had been sort of boring into our subconscious like a drill, and gone into a Bach fugue.

“It’s like a fugue, too,” Uncle Douglas said, as Aunt Elena started the fugue over again. “Elena and I are lucky ones. She has music and I have painting. They give form and shape to everything we do. It was music that kept Elena from being destroyed when Hal died. You’ll be better off when you know what you want to be, Vicky.”

“But I haven’t any talents,” I said, “the way John and Suzy do.”

“I think the trouble is that you have too many talents. There are all kinds of directions you could go. You’re an artist of some kind. That I’m sure of. It’s the roughest of all lives, and the most rewarding. There. That’s all I’m going to do today. Want to see it?”

I got up and looked at the painting. “I’d just as soon you didn’t cut it up into little pieces.”

“Like it? So do I. You’re on your way to being a real beauty, child, but it’s all in what’s behind your face. Right now everything’s promise. I’m not going to let you have this because I like it too. As a matter of fact it’s one of the best darned things I’ve ever done. Let’s go show it to Elena.”

“But she’s practicing.”

“Right. And I never interrupt her except for something special. Bless you, Vicky, my darling!” His voice soared happily. “I’ve finally broken through to something I’ve been reaching for for weeks and was beginning to despair about. Come on! Hi, Elena! Vicky and I’ve done it!” He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me in to Aunt Elena, and he was so happy that I completely forgot that I was miserable.