Two-Part Invention:

...In The Crosswicks Trilogy- A Circle of Quiet (1972), The Summer of Great-Grandmother (1974), and The Irrational Season (1985), named after the author's Connecticut farmhouse- L'Engle wrote a journal-like account of the everyday wife, mother, writer, daughter, and Christian behind these prolific writings...

...Madeleine L'Engle Two-Part Invention of The Cherry Orchard starring Eva La Gallienne and Joseph Senildkraut...

...In certain details, the world of Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage will be familiar territory to readers of the trilogy...

...It infuses her memoir with a specificity and intelligence that make this a valuable book, especially for married people...

...Her religious vision is as seductive as her story of the marriage...

...I suspect that in every good marriage there are times when love seems to be over...

...For it makes the lived ecstasy as well as "that silent communion which deepens between two people as they live together for many years," palpable and utterly precious...

...I realized that this young man was gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous...

...The narrative swings gracefully between the wife's memories of both married harmony and the dissonance generated by difficult circumstance and different temperaments...

...it moves back and forth between the comforting past and the unyielding, unforgiving present: the "progress" of the dying husband's disease...

...Sometimes these desert tines are simply the only way to the next oasis, which is far more lush and beautiful after the desert crossing than it could possibly have been without it...

...Hugh Franklin's gallant beauty and his sense of humor and generosity are of one piece for his wife...

...After that first rehearsal they talked for ten hours, ate hamburgers, and the young understudy, "full of joy," was certain she had "met the man I want to marry...

...Madeleine L'Engle was a freelance writer and understudy, living in New York City, when she first saw Franklin...

...I am who I am because of our years together, freed by his acceptance and love of me," she writes in the first days of grief...

...The author, a believing Christian, has the spiritual resources of prayer and sacrament which refine her perceptions and deepen her experience of all creation, including her marriage and family...

...Two-Part Invention makes their union believable without recourse to one romantic thrill or any lying flourishes...

...I had never seen such eyes...

...Since her first novel, Small Rain (1945), she has published thirty-four books of fiction and non-fiction...

...That is one way of praising this book: as a record of how love works and grows and survives death-the temporary deaths along the way, and the final, absolute last breath at the end...

...Hugh Franklin is radiant here, re-created through his wife's art as a wonderfully alive gentleman: impetuous, smart, decent, a man with perfect timing...

...On its deepest level, Two-Part Invention works as compelling proof of the incantational principle...

...Love was his meaning...

...Together, husband and wife lived the words of Conrad Aiken that Hugh Franklin had spoken to Madeleine L'Engle just before he proposed: "Music I heard with you was more than music/And bread I broke with you was more than bread...

...Physical beauty and attraction is only one chord in a long marriage, dominant or subdominant depending on a matter of other changing rhythms...

...At the end, trying to make sense, or at least peace with this two-part story of love and suffering, the author quotes Julian of Norwich: "Wouldst thou witten thy Lord's meaning in these things...

...In-evitably then have been times when one of us has outrun the other and has had to wait patiently for the other to catch up.There have been times when we have mismderstood each other, demanded too much of each other, teen insensitive to the other's needs...

...Radiantly profane as well as sacred, Two-Part Invention is a book of wisdom.a book of wisdom...

...In so doing it settles the hash of the green-eyed, sour-grapes-mockers who have so nastily and theoretically depicted marriage as the enemy of ecstasy...

...She, in turn, is a woman of high wit, with a down-to-earth honesty and a capacity for the pleasures of a good man's company, children and grandchildren, food, work, New England, New York City...

...His sweetness has animated her existence...

...Wit it well...

...I do not believe there is any marriage where this does not happen...

...The title is well-chosen, considering that the book follows two lives from the time of their first meeting to their final separation...

...But one hears its resonance-the man and woman's delight in matter-always in the background of Two-Part Invention...

...Franklin was playing Petya Trofimov: "I saw a very tall, thin young man with black hair and enormous, very blue eyes...

...It was at a rehearsal Our lave has been anything but perfect and anytbing but static...

...But the tone and thrust of L'Engle's latest book achieve an austere and moving power that is unique in her entire published canon...

...Though the theme of the loss of Hugh to cancer has run through the book from the beginning, it is Lady Julian's vision, embraced by the author, that makes the painful ending of the book bearable...

...The book is worthy of the man who inspired it...

...Two-Part Invention is the memoir of her nearly forty-five-year marriage to Hugh Franklin, a successful stage and television actor who died of cancer in the fall of 1987...

...It is also L'Engle's most beautiful book to date, a many-layered weave of sexual and domestic contentment, artistic achievement, religious faith, and sane politics...

...The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys...

...Its dynamics, as described here by the wife, Madeleine L'Engle Franklin, have much to do with the consolations of the flesh that in turn enliven the spirits of the lovers...

...Susan Cahill A record that survives death Madeleine L'Engle is best known for the 1962novel AWrinkIe in Time, still in print, after it was initially rejected again and again, a Newberry Prize winner and an all-time best selfer for Farrar, Straus, & Giroux...

...How, ask the counselors and the counseled, does a good one work...

...Crosswicks continues as an underground hit among women who have not stopped reading as they have taken on everything else...

...Simultaneously, as in a musical invention, we hear the wife-composer's attention to the deathbed and her rendition of a particular and happy marriage bed...

...Of all the accounts that have appeared to date, by and about contemporary working mothers, The Crosswicks Trilogy affords the fullest experience of the professional woman's balancing act...

...Four decades later, having lived together through the lean years of her rejection slips and his part-time employment, through difficult pregnancies and births and disappointing business choices, the enchanted girl's first vision is, in the voice of the seasoned wife, still told in a major key: Hugh is still "Beautiful to behold, with his white hair, patrician features, and those extraordinary blue eyes...

...Stories about a successful marriage are especially intriguing in our age...

...The death of Hugh Franklin, who in his hospital bed is for his wife "beautiful as an El Greco saint," is for her an "amputation...