The Simple Genius of Jon Klassen
Everything is watching you. The snakes, of course, along with the birds, bears, turtles, fish, rabbits, and horses. Also: the tables, the chairs, the bridges, the tents, the rocks, the plants, the trees, the trucks, the boats, and even the fires. But it turns out that children love a surveillance state, or so it seems, based on their adoration for the works of Jon Klassen, a children’s author and illustrator whose books are distinguished by, among other things, a hyperabundance of eyes.
Klassen’s distinctive peepers appear everywhere, including, once or twice, in the pages of this magazine. His long white oval scleras and perfect-circle black pupils, sometimes open and sometimes closed, are always inexplicably expressive—managing to seem happy, sad, scared, sleepy, shifty, angry, eager, alarmed, mischievous, or murderous. His suns stare curiously from one side of a page spread to another and his stacks of hay worriedly study the horizon, while his one-eyed stools and one-eyed fenceposts pop up like eager cyclopses.
This is perhaps just a sly trick of the trade, a version of what filmmakers call the Kuleshov effect, which Klassen himself has acknowledged, whereby we infer the emotion in a face from whatever that face is looking at. But it’s also obvious from his œuvre that Klassen remembers a fundamental truth about the world as children see it: all things are animate. A pebble, a Popsicle stick, a tiny piece of thread—a child can turn any object into a best friend with an intergenerational backstory, and any pair of things into a mother and baby who must never be parted. Everything is alive to young children, and there is nothing they like more than imagining the inner lives of whatever they see. Knowing this, Klassen makes marvellous use of anthropomorphism, including in a new board book this summer that tries to bring everything, even the book itself, to life.
Klassen is best known for a literal hat trick: a trilogy of picture books that he wrote and illustrated about animals and their hats, which are variously interpreted as meditations on honesty, justice, and mortality. The first of these books was the unexpectedly wicked “I Want My Hat Back,” from 2011, which delighted kids and distressed some of their parents with its lying liar of a bear and thieving thief of a rabbit. The text and the pictures are all hilariously stiff, as if the animals did not agree to appear in the book. And why would they? None of them comes off particularly well. “No,” the rabbit says when the bear first approaches him, asking him if he’s seen the bear’s hat:
An entire page turns red when the alarmed bear antihero of “I Want My Hat Back” realizes not only that his hat was stolen but that it was the rabbit who stole it; the final pages can shock squeamish readers with their suggestion that a reasonable punishment for theft might be death. There’s no blood or gore, just a disappearance really, and then a well-illustrated lie, perfectly appropriate for the knee-high crowd. And yet, thematically, the book linked Klassen to a long line of children’s authors, including Edward Gorey and the Brothers Grimm, who were not afraid of nursery noir.
A year after that best-seller, Klassen came out with a sequel of sorts, “This Is Not My Hat,” which substituted a Magritte-like bowler for a pointy party hat and moved the morality play underwater, with fish instead of forest animals. Like the first book of the trilogy, this one unfolds entirely in dialogue—only instead of giving us a narrator whose hat was stolen, this story is narrated by the fish who did the stealing. It begins with a confession, so the mystery isn’t what happened but whether the culprit will get away with the crime. It’s genuinely suspenseful; I will spoil it slightly by saying that the Code of Klassen turns out to be a bit like the Code of Hammurabi, and the penalty for larceny in this book is the same as in the one that came before.
In 2016, just when Klassen’s first generation of readers was old enough to appreciate an alternate ending, he offered one, in the third and final hat book. “We Found a Hat” begins with a ten-gallon cowboy hat and two turtles whose friendship is challenged by the numerically inconvenient fact that there are two of them and only one hat. It’s not a counting book, though there are three parts: interlocking stories with titles that invite tiny readers into the big-kid world of chapters. The grayscale of the first section, “Finding the Hat,” gives way to the desert-ombré colors of “Watching the Sunset,” and that is followed by a dreamy, otherworldly finale, “Going to Sleep.”
From wide-eyed intrigue to narrow-eyed upset, the eyes in all of these hat books tell the story, often by revealing a discrepancy between the words and the pictures, clueing children into the deceptions of the characters—and letting them realize that what people tell them might not be true. Take, for instance, the positively Pauline exploration of sin that unfolds midway through “We Found a Hat.” One turtle asks the other what he is thinking about. “Nothing,” the turtle answers, but with eyes that are engaged in the shiftiest of stares, looking back longingly at the cowboy hat, which he is very much thinking about, very seriously coveting, and contemplating taking for himself. Sometimes the eyes are the only thing that changes between spreads, a technique that is especially effective when the characters are rigid reptiles with a limited range of motion.
Both turtles survive “We Found a Hat,” but if readers were worried that Klassen might be going soft, then the droll book that he wrote and illustrated next assuaged their fears. You may not realize how much you need to read a picture book about oblivion until “The Rock from the Sky” arrives in your life like the Chicxulub crater. The three animals in this one—a turtle, an armadillo-mole-like creature, and a snake, all familiar from the hat trilogy—wear bowlers or a beret, but their sartorial choices matter less than watching the astronomical odds play out on every page, with a meteorite above and an unsuspecting world down below. Imagine if Beatrix Potter, Buster Keaton, and Samuel Beckett collaborated on a children’s book.
“The Rock from the Sky” is unusually long for a picture book, nearly a hundred pages, but it’s divided into five shorter stories, the way that Arnold Lobel used to structure his “Frog and Toad” books. In general, Klassen seems to hark back to an earlier era of children’s literature, when the books were long and the words were big and the stories were not necessarily “about” anything in the sense of having political arguments or sociological aims but were simply stories that kids liked to read, often because they were elusive or unpredictable or even unsettling, and their pictures even more so.
Although he is one of a kind, Klasssen doesn’t always do things by himself. He illustrated a picture book written by the poet Ted Kooser and another by the “Series of Unfortunate Events” author Lemony Snicket, a.k.a. Daniel Handler. He created beautiful pictures for three of Sara Pennypacker’s extraordinary middle-grade novels, first “Pax” and its sequel, and then, just this year, “The Lions’ Run.” Klassen won Caldecott Honors for his pictures in “Sam and Dave Dig a Hole” and “Extra Yarn,” both of which were written by his friend Mac Barnett, with whom he runs the Substack “Looking at Picture Books,” and made an Apple TV+ show called “Shape Island” based on their books “Triangle,” “Circle,” and “Square.” That last project is another example of Klassen’s talent for making inanimate objects animate—as is his 2023 novel “The Skull,” a reimagined folk tale, in which a chatty cranium befriends a runaway girl, and she returns the skull’s kindness by vanquishing the headless skeleton that haunts his mansion.
Lately, Klassen has brought those anthropomorphic gifts to board books, those indestructible literary objects that are larger than a cellphone and smaller than a tablet and far better than either for your child’s attention span, mood, and gums. Last year, Klassen published the trilogy “Your Places,” featuring picture books called “Your Farm,” “Your Forest,” and “Your Island.” The books give very small children pure possession of some of the places their imaginations most like to wander, with a palm tree and a boat for their island, a barn and a pile of hay for their farm, rocks and a bridge for their forest. All three begin the same way—“This is your sun. It is coming up for you.”—and end the same way, too, with everything asleep and an existentially reassuring refrain: “Now you can sleep too and think about what you will do there tomorrow.”
Going-to-bed books are the self-help genre of children’s literature, but these are almost entirely without plot, so falling asleep feels less like the purpose than a fact of life. Meanwhile, since the author isn’t really telling a story, just creating a cast, readers can take their island and their farm and their forest and do whatever they want with them. Doubling down on the mine, mine, mine nature of these things, the books have a page inside for their “owners” to write their names or have them written. Children sometimes memorize their favorite board books, an easy enough task since most of them have fewer than five hundred words. But Klassen’s board books welcome not just memorization but active participation, with readers mentally moving their props about as if they were toys and the book were a playset.
Earlier this year, Klassen published the first of a related board-book trilogy, “Your Things.” That book, “Your Truck,” will be followed by “Your Horse” this fall and then “Your Rock” next year. They all communicate effortless complexity via effortful simplicity, a remarkable exercise in restraint and economy that yields a Choose Your Own Adventure without any fear or danger. Your bird might fly away, but he always comes back; your truck will never run out of gas; your fire will never go out.
Before the second and third books in the “Your Things” series arrive, Klassen, ever prolific, will publish “The House with Nobody In It.” It is an actual object, so to speak: a board book in the shape of a house with die-cut doors and cut-out windows. It resembles the simple kind of house that children themselves sometimes draw or construct, whether with wobbly pencil lines or uncooked spaghetti or carefully stacked magnetic tiles—a holdable version of what their eyes register and re-create from the world.
Tellingly, there’s only a single thing with eyes in “The House with Nobody In It.” Perhaps Klassen got bored with his signature style and removed the eyes from the clock and table and boots in this book. Whatever the reason, the only eyeballs here belong to a ghost—a friendly fellow who first appeared in “Your Forest,” found now on the front and back covers, and one interior page. Because the pages and the architecture of “The House with Nobody In It” are layered just so, the ghost is visible on far more pages than those on which he appears.
Like a house tour, the book moves through room after room from the front door to a sitting room and dining room and bedroom and yard. The text begins:
What the line break is to the poet, the page turn is to the children’s-book author, and Klassen knows just how much suspense his readers can bear (or fish, or bird, or ghost). That “Let’s go” is a cliff hanger on the right page of every spread until the very last one. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, and then we’re gone: ghosts in an empty house, maybe there, maybe not, maybe seen, maybe unseen.
There’s something so beguiling about the obvious irony of the title, the perplexing insistence of the narrator, and the comic persistence of the ghost. Children will argue with the book, laugh at the words, poke their fingers through the windows and doors, search the house’s rooms and inventory its objects, try to color in the book’s blank spaces or add a chimney, prop it open like an actual haunted house. But sometime, maybe only later when they’ll read “The House with Nobody In It” to a sibling or, years and years from now, to their own children, they will recognize the ghost that they themselves have become, not only to this story but to their own past. That’s the relationship all of us have to our childhood; we are the “somebody” who used to live in that house. ♦