Kids lit grows up

Chabon feels similarly: "You never forget the delight that the books you loved as a child brought you; it's all still there, you remember it. It's fairly inevitable, I'd say, to want to try and get some of that for your own kids; but in the past, in this country at least, it was not necessarily feasible and perhaps not quite taken seriously enough."

As Chabon notes, the appearance of these books does seem, for some of the writers at least, tied to the children in their lives. Isabel Allende says that her new "City of the Beasts" was inspired by reading to her grandchildren. The household of Clive Barker, whose "Abarat" is the first in a new fantasy series, includes the teenage daughter of his partner. Michael Chabon is only partly joking when he says that he always thought he was going to write kids books because he was a kid when he first wanted to become a writer.

But having his own kids returned Chabon to that desire. "I started back through the beloved books of my childhood with my oldest daughter. We began with the 'Wizard of Oz' when she was about 2 and a half, and on through Lewis and Tolkien and Ingalls Wilder and Dahl and Alexander and O'Dell and Fitzhugh and White. And it was all still so wonderful, and just as reading Alan Furst, say, makes me think about writing spy fiction ... I started thinking, Hey, I want to do this. I still want to do this."

You can't help but wonder, though, whether there's another reason, one these writers haven't acknowledged to themselves -- namely the sheer challenge of writing for kids. The old excuse among writers who write long is that they did it because they didn't have time to write short. While some of the batch of new books are long ("Summerland" comes in at just over 500 pages), kids books, no matter how long they are, require writers who know how to write essentially.

That's a very different matter from writing simply, which, in the context of children's literature, has the connotation of dumbing things down. Even when the back story or mythology of a children's book becomes complicated, the story has to be expressed in the clearest possible terms. That means finding what might be called a suggestive concreteness, a way of conveying action, character and setting in a few sharply defined strokes.

It's an egalitarian approach, allowing the readers to shade things in for themselves. Here, from the opening of "Coraline," is a description of a forbidding well on the grounds of the house that the young heroine's family moves into:

"She found it on the third day, in an overgrown meadow beside the tennis court, behind a clump of trees -- a low black circle almost hidden in the high grass. The well had been covered up by wooden boards, to stop anyone from falling in. There was a small knothole in one of the boards, and Coraline spent an afternoon dropping pebbles and acorns through the hole and waiting, and counting, until she heard the plop as they hit the water far below."

Gaiman melds the secret and the hidden with a sense of danger, drawing a picture of the well as a lurking presence in the high grass; he describes the boards, which raises the possibility of someone falling to his death. And then there's the way he uses the evocative clause "and counting," which allows us to imagine the depth of the well.

As it turns out, there's a more dangerous portal lurking in "Coraline." Exploring her family's new apartment, Coraline comes upon a door in the living room that opens onto a skewed replica of her family's new digs. Waiting for her on the other side are her other "parents," funhouse mirror replicas of the real ones with black buttons sewn on for eyes (told you it was creepy). Coraline finds everything she's wished for in this alternate reality: parents who pay attention to her and delicious food. Then it turns out this "other mother" has no intention of letting Coraline get back to her real life. Gaiman's book is a potent parable about a little girl getting her first inklings of the compromises of the adult world. It's also a good, frightening read. (The book says it's for readers 8 and up. I'd just make sure I knew the fright threshold of any 8-year-old I gave it to.)

One of the reasons Isabel Allende's insufferable "City of the Beasts" doesn't work is that she trusts neither her material nor her readers. She falls prey to one of the classic traps of bad writing: She puts her story at the service of her message.

Kids can scent the kind of didacticism Allende engages in, and she doesn't even use the proverbial spoonful of sugar to help her medicine go down. She shows no faith in her audience's ability to suss things out without being preached to. You never get the feeling she believes in the material on any level but the "instructive" one; it's merely a sanctimonious little lesson in how man is despoiling the environment. This is exactly the kind of reductionism that William Bennett exalts in literature, only in Allende's case, it's coming from the left instead of the right.

And it shrivels up next to Carl Hiaasen's charming "Hoot," another environmental tale, but one in which, as in his Floridian mysteries, Hiaasen's first concern is to be an entertainer. He uses a reliable old formula, that of the new kid in town finding his place, and joins it to one of his multistrand plots, this one about a scheme to save a group of miniature owls who've made their home in a vacant lot scheduled to have a pancake house built on top of it.

It won't take Hiaasen's adult readers long to realize they're in Hiaasen country -- not when the corporate dolt is named Chuck E. Muckle and when the characters include a kid who can fart the first line of the Pledge of Allegiance. Hiaasen is the environmentalist as vaudevillian. When a kid slips baby gators down the porta-san at the construction site, you know you're dealing with the same man who once fantasized about putting bull gators in the tourist pond at Disney World.

That Hiaasen is such a natural at writing for children gives weight to Daniel Handler's insistence that there is no difference between writing for kids and writing for adults."I always suspect that people who regard them as different things are the sort of people who talk to children in that annoying high-pitched voice." And Chabon echoes that sentiment when he says, "I tried to keep my sentences shorter, my diction plainer and my vocabulary simpler" -- but, he adds, he didn't feel he had to try very hard.

Still, if writing for kids requires more discipline, it may also be liberating. Chabon, who calls writing "Summerland" "the most pleasurable experience, page for page and paragraph for paragraph, that I've ever had as a writer," says that the book allowed him to write about all sorts of fantastical things "without apologies or explanations or rationales."

What's striking about the best of these books, and what's always true about great fantasies, is that they're rooted in recognizable emotions. One of the reasons Harry Potter has been such a success is the casualness of J.K. Rowling's style, the fact that she's writing about wizards and witches and demons and dragons at the same time that she's describing school bullies and tests and grumpy teachers and first crushes and feeling left out. There's no hoity-toity ethereality in her brand of magic, no Stevie Nicks-style preciousness. The books are written in the same good, durable, plain language that you find in Hiaasen and Gaiman and Chabon -- and even in the mock-Gothic grotesqueries of Lemony Snicket.

There are plenty of reasons for writing a kids book right now, some of them obvious, like the financial rewards and the current critical attention paid to children's literature. Other reasons -- the satisfaction the writers get from giving back the kind of pleasure they experienced as children, for instance -- are more personal and intangible. But there's one other reason that not even writers themselves may be aware of: Writing for kids allows them to fulfill the great primal satisfactions novels can give us, while it demands that they work at the absolute peak of the craft. It's a win-win situation: Readers are reminded of why they read in the first place, and writers of why they ever wanted to write.

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