Liars and Saints

  "Sam and Dave Dig a Hole" is a title that exactly fits its story. Sam and Dave, two boys, head out with just a supply of apple juice and animal crackers. Dreaming of something extraordinary, they dig a hole. Here is where the story gets strange. If you follow just the text, the events are straightforward. The kids keep adjusting their path--but it seems that nothing is "out there." But the pictures tell a different story. Always--just beyond Sam's view--there is an enormous diamond. Always, right before the discovery of the diamond, a wrong turn occurs. So the reader has an early (a first?) taste of dramatic irony. This would just be a decent joke--but then the narrative takes off. We shift to the perspective of Sam's wordless dog. As Sam and Dave nap, the dog hunts for a bone--and his digging causes him to fall through the center of the Earth. Naturally, Sam and Dave (sleeping) fall *with* the dog. On new terrain, Sam and Dave mistakenly believe that they...

 Jon Klassen's "The Skull" has a sensational opening: As she ran....Otilla began to hear her name being called. She couldn't tell if it was someone's voice or the wind in her ears.  Otillaaaa....Otillaaaa.... The narrator never explains what the heroine is fleeing. We only sense that the danger is severe. After running for a long while, Otilla stumbles on a palace, owned by a friendly skull. Otilla and the skull become companions, taking walks, dancing, snacking together. But the skull has a secret of its own. Every night, a headless skeleton emerges and begins a chase. "Come to me!" screams the skeleton. Otilla cannot repress her own painful memories, but she can make life easier for the skull. She throws the headless skeleton from a cliff. Then, she gathers the scattered bones and grinds them into a paste. She dissolves the paste in boiling water, and she dumps the mixture into a bottomless well. Klassen has a remarkable talent for taking children seri...

 One of my favorite children's stories, "The Photograph," uses dramatic irony. It's an extremely short story by James Marshall. Martha the hippo visits a photo booth; the result is a terrible, unflattering portrait. But Martha, with her immense self-regard, sees only evidence of dazzling beauty. No one corrects Martha. The story ends in this odd, uncomfortable way: We, in the audience, observe something that Martha cannot observe. Jon Klassen has (I think) studied James Marshall. Klassen also likes to produce images that are in tension with the words on the page. "No one saw me steal this hat," boasts a little fish (but a crab is a silent witness, in a distant meadow of seaweed). In "Sam and Dave Dig a Hole," the two heroes are always just inches from uncovering a diamond--but they're unaware, because they don't have the cosmic perspective that we readers have. One of my beloved Klassen scenes has two little ones studying masks, mounted on ...

  Today, the NYTimes celebrates one of my favorite writers, Jon Klassen; the critic praises Klassen's subversive gifts. Couldn't say it better myself. Many classic fables and fairy tales involve theft or murder, i.e. "Goldilocks," "Little Red," "Jack and the Beanstalk," "Rapunzel," "Rumpelstiltskin." Klassen returns us to the anarchic world of fairy tales. His stories feature violence, self-delusion, and deceit. It's sort of crazy (and delightful) that, in the era of "Cocomelon" and "Miss Rachel," Jon Klassen is the winner of a Caldecott Medal. I especially like his story, "The Future," which seems to rewrite Chris Van Dusen's "If I Built a School." In the van Dusen tale, the power of the mind is celebrated; a child dreams of an ideal school (perhaps on Mars! with robots!), and the reader can offer three cheers for the wonders of ingenuity. This seems to be the path "The Futur...

  I like to quote Curtis Sittenfeld: "The greatest of literary characters is Arnold Lobel's Toad, who is almost always the author of his own problems. He cannot get out of his head." The famous example: Toad has a ridiculous bathing suit. Instead of laughing at himself, and moving on, he attempts to design a setting in which *no one* will look at the bathing suit. This elaborate plot only helps to make the suit seem more and more hilariously awful--and Toad sputters with rage. The End. Lobel's heir is Jon Klassen, who wrote "The Fall." In this story, a turtle climbs up on a rock, then stumbles to the ground, landing on his shell. He is mortified. A friendly armadillo asks if an accident has occurred--and the turtle denies the obvious. He then rejects an offer of help. He can't manage his own sense of chagrin, so he directs all of his frustration at the armadillo. "Will you nap with me?" asks the armadillo, and the turtle says, NO. I NEVER NAP. ...

Jon Klassen, "The Rock": A little turtle insists that he has found the best spot on Earth. But the camera pulls back and reveals that a large meteor is approaching; it could fall on the turtle's head. An armadillo visits the turtle--but he perceives some kind of danger. He announces this, and he moves away, but, for fear of being rude, he doesn't simply say, "Turtle, drag your ass away from that spot." The turtle has an additional chance to save himself, but he doubles down on his wrong idea: "MY SPOT IS BETTER." We suspect that the armadillo might hear perfectly, but--because of passive aggression, or because of a desire to save the turtle--the armadillo screams, COME CLOSER. I CANNOT HEAR YOU... This insane dialogue ends when the meteor slams into the Earth; the turtle has inched forward just enough to discover that he is "spared."  What is remarkable to me is how quickly, how efficiently, Klassen gets two ridiculous souls onto the page...

  Two foundations of good writing are: tension and irony. You don't always see these tools in a picture book. You do not find them in "Hands Are Not for Hitting." That's why Jon Klassen is so unusual. He has just written a book, "The Skull," that has made some waves. In this brief Tyrolean folk tale, a girl, Otilla, runs away from home. ("Finally, she had escaped. And she would never, never return.") She stumbles on a castle, a property that is managed by a tiny skull. She and the skull become friendly--and the skull admits that, each night, a headless skeleton visits and causes havoc. The skeleton shouts, "YOU ARE MINE," and tries to force the skull into slavery. What occurs next is delightful, surprising, and weirdly plausible. Tension: A gap between speech and thought. We never learn what happened between Otilla and her family--but we can feel the weight of Otilla's past in every scene. Irony: We might not expect a skull to act as ...

Lightning can strike twice.  Years ago, Jon Klassen wrote "I Want My Hat Back." This story concerns a bear who has lost his hat. He interviews various forest creatures .... who deny any knowledge of the missing hat. One creature--a rabbit, in a hat--seems unusually chatty. "I don't know anything about a hat," he says quickly. "Why would you ask? I'm not a thief. Please don't speak to me again." We can glide through our days on autopilot, without thinking, and this is what the bear does. (Understandable. The rabbit was so emphatic!) But, eventually, the bear meets a deer, who says, "Can you describe your hat?" In painting a verbal picture, the bear has an important thought. He *has* seen his hat today. The hat was on the chatty rabbit. We all slide around on a spectrum from good to bad; no one is purely heroic. The bear surprises us by eating the rabbit, reclaiming his hat, then denying he has ever had any "rabbit encounters"...