A Severed Wasp

This is Madeleine L'Engle's sequel to The Small Rain, and it was written forty years afterwards. Katherine is now an elderly woman, retired from performing. Her husband (she ended up marrying her piano teacher, Justin) has died, and while she's been living in France, she decides to move back to New York. She comes in contact with old friends, makes some new ones, and becomes part of a very ugly mystery.

Another fascinating book. It's almost all conversations, characters chatting about things that have happened as well as ideas and books and music and art. While the central character isn't religious, most of the surrounding ones are - most of the action is based in the NY Cathedral where L'Engle was writer-in-residence. At the same time, there's an enormous amount of discussion about sex, sexuality, fidelity. It's a really unusual book, and I have to wonder who she imagined her audience was.

A lot of the characters in it are from her other books, a lot of kids from her children's books grown up with kids of their own. They're all involved in either the arts or science, they're all wonderful musicians or amazing thinkers. They all have a vocation of sorts. You can see that's how L'Engle thinks, because that's the world she lived in. There's also a lot of ugliness, real ugliness, which she never shies away from, even though often it doesn't feel particularly realistic. And everyone, like in all her books, is verbose; you never have to guess at anyone's thoughts.

It definitely doesn't read like a picture of a real world, but it's her world, and it's a very very interesting one. She explains the mystery, but doesn't resolve many of the issues at the end of the story, and I like that. She creates characters who can't exist but you'd like them to. A fascinating read from a fascinating person.