The green-eyed monster is stalking literary novelists — or so you might conclude from a recent trend: an uptick in adult fiction that invents, and muses about, wildly popular children’s fantasy series.
(Photo courtesy of Other Press/PHOTO COURTESY OF OTHER PRESS) - Charles Elton, author of ‘Mr. Toppit.’
Last month saw the publication of “The Magician King,” the sequel to Lev Grossman’s best-selling 2009 novel “The Magicians,” whose fledgling-wizard characters obsess about “Fillory and Further,” a multi-volume yarn for youngsters. The hero of “The Magicians” and “The Magician King” finds he can travel to the enchanted kingdom of Fillory, which bears a passing resemblance to C.S. Lewis’s Narnia.
Other novelists are concocting plots that deal — with varying degrees of cynicism and passion — with kid-lit mania. Timothy Schaffert’s “The Coffins of Little Hope,” published in the spring, depicts a small U.S. town on tenterhooks as it awaits the publication of the final tome in the Miranda-and-Desiree series, an eerie gothic saga about two sisters.
Charles Elton’s “Mr. Toppit,” published in the United States last year, deals with the fallout from “The Hayseed Chronicles”: blockbuster fables that evoke visions of Lord Voldemort stalking Winnie the Pooh. And then there’s A.S. Byatt’s 2009 “The Children’s Book,” involving a writer of fairy tales in the lead-up to World War I. And “The Unwritten,” Mike Carey and Peter Gross’s best-selling graphic novels about the son of a J.K. Rowling-like storyteller.
Juvenile page-turners have not exactly been a common narrative motif in stories for adults heretofore, but it’s understandable that they should sprout up now. In the real world, the “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” franchises have reared like Hagrids over the entertainment landscape. Given the rabid intergenerational following and economic clout of those novel-spawned empires, high-culture scribblers have to be squirming just a little with envy and angst — or, at least, asking themselves a big “What if?”
“There comes a point where literary writers who sell some tiny percentile of what Rowling does think, ‘God, am I really using all the tools I have available?’ ” observes Grossman, book critic for Time magazine.
“It would be interesting to see your characters become part of the mass culture, part of the larger conversation the world is having,” Schaffert says, a tad wistfully. “I can’t imagine what that would be like — to be, in a sense, shaping the way the world examines itself.”
It was the whoop-de-do surrounding the publication of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” Schaffert says, that partly inspired “The Coffins of Little Hope,” with its allusions to top-secret printing-plant schemes and Miranda-and-Desiree fan fiction. At the time, Schaffert was promoting his novel “Devils in the Sugar Shop.”
“You’d go into these bookstores to do your signing or reading, and maybe a few people would show up, and maybe the bookseller would be interested,” he remembers. Meanwhile, the same stores were planning “big productions” to welcome back the Quidditch crew.
“I don’t know that I necessarily felt jealous — because I know the plight of the literary novel and contemporary publishing,” adds Schaffert, who teaches creative writing at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. “I don’t go into it expecting it to have that kind of popularity and success, or I would write a totally different kind of novel. But — yeah, you notice it.”
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