TWO-PART INVENTION The Story of a Marriage <i> by Madeleine L’Engle Farrar Straus Giroux: $18.95) </i>

“The thing I love about Bach is the strength, simplicity and shape he gives to beauty,” writes Madeleine L’Engle, the Newbery Award-winning novelist for children and adults. “For most of us everything in the world seems to swirl around in an amorphous mass of confusion--even the lovely parts of it. Bach takes its beauty--which is somehow blurred in its looseness--and subdues it to his own great and simple spirit.” L’Engle does much the same in this memoir of a 40-year marriage, writing close to her heart while maintaining a graceful sense of control. Style can be obtrusive, of course, distancing readers from real pain and joy, but L’Engle’s technique is usually indiscernible; this memoir has a dreamlike quality, capturing moods by evoking the feeling of wood fires and spring rains at Crosswicks, her New England farmhouse, for instance, but omitting details from the temporal world, such as dates, ages and times.

Later chapters recounting her husband’s losing bout with cancer understandably overshadow stories about L’Engle’s early marriage and acting career, which seem like wispy diary entries in comparison. Rather than making us feel we should assume her burden, however, L’Engle lifts us out of any depression by using illness as a starting point for endearingly eccentric reflections on life’s richness, love and nature. She quotes physicist John Gribbin, for example--”The particles that make up my body once jostled in close proximity and interacted with the particles that make up your body”--and then wonders if making love is itself a way of returning to the unity that existed at the dawn of the universe.