Book Review: A House Like a Lotus

Title: A House Like a Lotus

Author: Madeleine L’Engle

Date: 1984

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux

ISBN: 0-440-93685-3

Length: 302 pages

Quote: “I didn’t say it would be easier without his ‘help.’”

Madeleine L’Engle said in the 1980s that she didn’t want to think of herself as either a children’s or an adults’ novelist. She wrote novels about children and novels about adults, and the protagonists, almost all female, were always like herself at some age she’d been...

A Wrinkle in Time, the first novel about angel-in-training Meg Murry, was considered a children’s book; Meg is teamed up with two other apprentice angels, her brother and her future husband, on a mission to rescue her father—and if that’s not a juvenile plot, what is? The ultimate little-kid fantasy: remaining a child while having the power to rescue an adult.

That novel was followed by Meet the Austins, in which Vicky Austin, a schoolmate, makes just one brief mention of time travel “like Meg and Charles Wallace Murry,” but isn’t in their classes and doesn’t know the details. Then came A Wind in the Door, where Meg, Calvin, and another apprentice angel from another planet travel into a structure in one of his cells to save Charles Wallace from a disease. Then, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, where Charles Wallace time-travels, and Meg, grown-up and married, psychically watches him travel, to help the right ancestors marry each other so that a foreign dictator will be born with a disposition toward peace. Then, The Arm of the Starfish, where Meg’s eldest daughter, Polly, and Vicky Austin’s future mate, Adam, are caught up in a spy story in Europe; we learn that Vicky is in between Meg's and Polly's ages. Then Dragons in the Waters, where Meg’s eldest two children, Polly and Charles, meet Simon Renier on a cruise to Venezuela. Then, Many Waters, where Meg’s other two brothers time-travel all by themselves. And—by no means finally—next in the story is A House Like a Lotus, where Polly and Charles are separated, leaving Polly alone in high school, not quite bonding with her cousin Kate or younger brother Xan, having emotional energy to pour into taking two other relationships, with teacher/friend Max and boyfriend Queron “Renny” Renier (Simon’s cousin), too seriously.

And, although all the other novels about this family were G-rated, this one isn’t even PG-13. Polly commits fornication. She doesn’t share that memory in pornographic detail, but she tells enough to leave no room for doubt that she initiated a premarital sex act. (While she was in high school and he was through college, yet.) In Polly's memory, that consensual sex act between half-grown girl and full-grown man takes place "on stage." Definitely rated R.

She did that because it was the 1980s; the so-called sexual revolution, the cultural trend that really hurt so many not-exactly-“little girls,” was not yet over. (AIDS existed and was not fully understood. L’Engle obviously started the novel with a mental image of Max dying of AIDS, then changed it to a rare tropical disease after reading that only male homosexuals were at risk...I never asked, and L’Engle never told, but I’ve long suspected from hints in and around this novel that L’Engle was writing about something that happened to one of her children and changing the genders.)

A lot of the other sixteen-year-olds at their school are having sex and getting into trouble. Pretty, popular cousin Kate “knows how to take care of herself” on dates, which means she’s handing out a lot of hand jobs. Polly is skinny and has no boyfriends other than Renny, who’s older, so her schoolmates don’t know about him. People are starting to drop hints that Polly might not really be female, or heterosexual. The hints get thicker and uglier as Polly spends more time with Max and her housemate Ursula, who are indeed lesbians, though perfectly discreet about it—when they’re sober. But one night Max gets drunk and makes a harmless verbal invitation...

I don’t think today’s readers can possibly understand the emotional weight this scene had for Polly’s contemporaries in the early 1980s. It's not that Polly can't handle her friend's lesbianism. It's that Polly's whole surrounding culture can't handle that. In 1984 the first wave of agitation for tolerance of homosexuality was generating a backlash, such that if anyone had ever even hinted that you might have homosexual tendencies, you were told you could forget about any kind of job that would bring you into contact with children, ever. In New York or San Francisco people might be proud of their broadmindedness, and in Washington there were furtive rumors about back streets in Georgetown, but in most of the Eastern States it was still believed that homosexuality was permanent and uncontrollable all right...just like schizophrenia, to which it was suspected of having some mysterious link, although the link turned out to be simply that both things were regarded with ignorance and horror.

Girls Polly’s and my age were still hearing that we were at least partly to be blamed for giving people the idea that they could ask us for sexual favors. Going out with a guy was considered to give him the idea that he was supposed to ask, or touch, although he was also supposed to stop asking or touching on command. Dates were supposed to involve endless haggling with just a tiny bit more physical intimacy being allowed on each successive date. Tedious? Oh mercy, was it ever tedious. You could just skip the whole mess until you were twenty or so, if you didn’t have a close female friend or know any lesbians, and some girls opted to do that because the dating game was such a bore.

So, what Max says, even while drunk, wouldn’t upset you or me, but it drives Polly to the absolute edge of sanity...which is how that sort of thing happened in 1984. 1984 was the year when, after I’d indignantly denied that my best friend had any more lesbian tendencies than I had, she’d quietly told me that she had had a lesbian affair with an overt lesbian friend of hers. I didn’t run out and throw myself at a young man, but I did rush out and lose my breakfast. In non-Christian novels like Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman, a friend's confession that she's a lesbian was the final horror that prompted the protagonist's suicide...

Anyway Polly is a half-grown child in an insanely homophobic society, so when Max beckons her closer mumbling “I need an affirmation of being,” Polly naturally runs out into the rainy night in a borrowed nightgown, cutting her under-protected foot, and demands that Renny help bandage her foot, telling him she can’t go home. She can’t tell her parents Max made a pass at her. Her whole social world would cave in! Because of course a lesbian invitation left a girl covered in a layer of psychic slime, and that was Polly’s fault for trusting a lesbian, and if she hadn’t had lesbian tendencies of her own she would have known better than to spend time alone with Max. It sounds crazy, but what it was was 1984. Polly is confused, but not nearly so badly as most of the older people she knows.

This is not the way we teach children about pedophiles any more...well, Max is not exactly a pedophile, and Lotus is absolutely not a book for children. It’s a novel for young adults, written with the intention of, primarily, explaining to skeptical young adults that yes indeed it was possible for a normal healthy girl with the capacity to like sex to say no. (This was a matter of intense debate in 1984.)

After that encounter that Renny says, shakenly, “mustn’t happen again until you’re a lot older,” Polly’s schedule features an unexpectedly convenient trip to a Greek island. On the island she meets Zachary, the rich, good-looking, but unreliable older boy who’s failed Vicky Austin in two moments of physical danger already, and Omio, the youngest adult in the group, who befriends Polly and rescues her when Zachary can’t, but who is married. As a virgin Polly wasn’t attracted to any of the boys at her school. On the island, “awakened” and in heat, she is attracted to both of those older men. Her story is about how and why she says no. (To herself, and to Zachary, she says no; Omio is honorable enough to have said no to himself in the first place, so he never asks.) So she does still have something to say to today’s teenagers.

Madeleine L’Engle was a Christian and had written some things for her church. This is definitely not a churchy book. The Moon by Night, in which Vicky is not particularly religious but does save herself and Zachary partly by chanting religious poems/prayers while they’re waiting to be rescued, could have been considered a Christian book. Polly claims no religion beyond a preference for Max’s agnosticism over Zachary’s avowed atheism. She does not say, even to herself, in so many words, “I like other men, but I want a monogamous marriage with Renny.” She can’t count on having that, since he’s not asked. She can only feel, in an inarticulate teenaged way, that she really doesn't want to cut off that possibility if and whenever he does ask.

I wasn’t a great deal older than Polly when this story about her was a new book. I remember snapping it up and thinking that it was a strange book for a writer like L’Engle, but that she’d got the characterization of Polly and her feelings absolutely right; I was preserving my virginity for different reasons and in different circumstances than Polly, but I was close enough to find Polly believable and satisfactory.

If you want to move beyond the clichés of romance and explore the world of hotties who know how to play it cool, A House Like a Lotus is for you. I’m even willing to overlook its use of another 1980s cliché that deserves to be forgotten—Polly’s belief that she has to go through the motions of some sort of reconciliation with Max to keep herself from being doomed to commit some sort of sexual abuse of some other person—because, after all, Max doesn’t learn that she’s about to die, get stinking drunk, and babble about affirmations of being, every day, and she is most heartily sorry; she deserves to be forgiven.

At least three editions of this novel have been printed. What I physically have for sale is a pocket-size paperback, which would fit into one $5 package along with at least seven more books of similar size. What I'm keeping is a hardcover first edition, such as would fit into one $5 package along with three more books of similar size. What Amazon will try to show you first, if you click on the book picture link, is a new edition I've never seen, but the Amazon page says it's similar in size to the hardcover edition. What you'll get, for $5 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment as usual, is whichever is available to this web site on the most favorable terms. In any case the $5 shipping charge covers as many books as I can jam into the package. Although Madeleine L'Engle no longer needs the $1 she'd get if her vintage novels were still Fair Trade Books, you're welcome to browse around and add older books by living authors to the package.