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- - - - Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
- - - - SECTION: Section E; Page 3; Column 4; The Arts/Cultural Desk LENGTH: 986 words HEADLINE: MAKING BOOKS;
BYLINE: By Martin Arnold BODY: Two of the most widely anticipated children's books that will be out there this fall have been written not by traditional children's novel writers (or even by writers who unwittingly produce juvenile work), but by authors known for their popular and acclaimed adult books. These awaited "chapter books" -- that's what children's novels are called to distinguish them from other children's books -- are by Carl Hiaasen and Michael Chabon. Mr. Hiaasen normally writes best-selling witty novels of the political flimflam of environmental rape in Florida and other mayhems, and Mr. Chabon's last adult fiction was a comic novel about the struggle for personal liberation. Both men are very serious about their children's novels, and in fact join a long tradition of writers who have knowingly wandered from the adult to the juvenile. For instance, Kipling had his "Jungle Book," 1 and 2, and his "Just So Stories." The author best known for "Winnie the Pooh," A. A. Milne, was a successful dramatist. E. B. White, the great New Yorker writer, went children with the classic "Charlotte's Web." So, too has William Steig, the cartoonist. The creator of the sophisticated license-to-kill spy James Bond, Ian Fleming, wrote "Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang," which became a movie and is now a musical on the London stage. (Actually, that's more a case of a writer switching from adult juvenilia to pure juvenile.) Alice Hoffman, Alice Walker and Dean Koontz did it, and so, too, did the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. HarperCollins will soon have children's books by Clive Barker, the horrorist writer, and Neil Gaiman, the fantasy writer. The question is, if writers of adult books want to be inhabitants of the children's book world, do the writers, of necessity, change prose styles? The answer is, they shouldn't. Mr. Hiaasen's children's book, "Hoot" (Alfred A. Knopf), edited by Nancy Siscoe, will be in stores in September. He said: "You try to write like you normally do. In places where Nancy thought I was writing down a line or two, she would catch it." He didn't write down to his young audience, but he cleaned up the language. "I was always queasy about giving my nephews and nieces and stepson my books, considering the language," he said. "But even my mother approves of the language in this book." "Hoot," in fact, is a typical Hiaasen book in that there are good guys and bad guys and the bad guys get theirs in, as Ms. Siscoe said, "a delicious way": kids in the book are not going to let construction destroy a colony of burrowing owls. Ms. Siscoe said, "What's important for the writer is to have in mind what a 13-year-old reader knows and doesn't know." The difference between a police sergeant and a police captain, for instance, a 13-year-old might not know. "Some adult writers make the mistake of writing down," she said, "and kids get that and disdain it." Michael Chabon agrees that writing down is a mistake. Indeed, he said: "I plotted it out more carefully than I usually plot my books. Normally I'm more careless and sloppy." His children's novel, "Summerland" (Talk Miramax Books/Hyperion), will be published in the fall. It is about Native American "little people," that is, tiny magical-power, imaginary (well, who really knows?) fairies, similar to the Celtic wee folk. "I wondered if I could use Native American stories and American lore and mythology in the same way as the Celtic fairy stories," he said. Both men undertook the challenge for essentially the same reason. Esther Newburg, Mr. Hiaasen's agent, said her client did it "because he has a 10-year-old stepson and he wanted to write something for a 10-year-old." The author recalls "being swept up by the Hardy Boys books, and thinking what I enjoyed about them was that they didn't seem to be written as if speaking to a fourth grader although they were speaking to a fourth grader." He said that the Hardy Boys "had me going to the dictionary once or twice, and that wasn't a bad thing." (In "Hoot," the word "pungently" could have a child dictionary bound.) Mr. Chabon said: "The most obvious reason I did it is because I have three children, my oldest 7 1/2. I wanted to write a book for my children and my grandchildren someday, and this book is about fulfillment." "Some of the books I loved as a kid I loved more as an adult," he said, "and it took being an adult to realize how beautifully written they were." Jonathan Burnham, editor in chief of Talk Miramax Books, said he thought "Summerland" could actually be a crossover book, and that people who enjoyed his "Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" (Random House, 2000) "will be able to read this one." "We are very confident of a young audience," he said, "but adults can read it with no sense of a shift in what they are reading. There's that gap in the American canon." Maybe. Is "Huckleberry Finn" an adult novel that children like or a children's novel that adults like? Both Mr. Hiaasen and Mr. Chabon are receiving advances greatly beyond children's book writers' advances, but since both receive even greater sums for their regular novels it's hard to say they are writing for children for the money. For their publishers, it's the money, not the fun, that counts. Mr. Chabon's book will have a first printing of 250,000 copies, tremendous for any novel, an enormous ocean for a children's book, no matter how playful. But Hyperion is part of Disney, and Disney isn't afraid of children. Mr. Hiaasen's first printing will be 75,000, hefty by most standards but not his own. (The average children's novel first printing is 10,000 to 15,000.) The moral of all this may simply be that the word bin of a 13-year-old is always open and it's pretty neat that there's always a group of writers of adult big books trying to fill it. Least that's what a real Florida boy would tell you, as Mr. Hiaasen might say. http://www.nytimes.com GRAPHIC: Photos: Children's books this fall by Carl Hiaasen and Michael Chabon, usually authors for grownups. LOAD-DATE: May 16, 2002 - - - -
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