The Back Page: Pond Jumpers.

Ott, Bill (author).

Maybe it’s the state of the publishing business, but I’m noticing a whole lot of pond jumping going on lately. That is, writers who are swimming in a big pond—sometimes successfully, sometimes just treading water—climb out of that pond and dive into a smaller one nearby. The attraction of small ponds is almost axiomatic: less competition, fewer barriers to success; not so many fish, more chance to be noticed. But sometimes the strategy backfires, and the big fish find themselves gasping for air in the confines of the small pond.

Pond jumping has been with us as long as there have been writers, but the jumpers have typically been those who have had trouble swimming in the big ponds. Take mystery writers. Many of the genre’s biggest names were failed literary novelists before they decided to try their hands at crime, often out of desperation. Jim Thompson, the godfather of noir, envisioned himself as a front page of the New York Times Book Review kind of guy, but he never got closer than a Barnes & Noble remainder table. Then he bled his frustrations onto the page in genre classics such as The Killer inside Me. James M. Crumley was well on his way down the same road until he turned to crime and wrote The Last Good Kiss, considered by many to be the best hard-boiled mystery of all time. James Lee Burke published a handful of nongenre novels that sunk to the bottom of the big pond without generating even a ripple. Then he had the idea for a detective series starring a Cajun cop called Dave Robicheaux.

These days, though, pond jumping isn’t merely the province of the unsuccessful. Celebrated literary novelists Robert Stone and Michael Chabon, for example, have hit the jackpot by adding a thriller element to their complex, multidimensional fictions. Stone’s Damascus Gate and Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union won multiple awards and may well represent their authors’ best work. Yet, because critics celebrating these books played the “transcends-the-genre” card, many readers failed to recognize the pond-jumping element lurking behind the success of both novels. But don’t be fooled by fancy talk. A pond is still a pond.

Perhaps the pond most frequently jumped into today is children’s and YA fiction. If you happen to be an adult novelist hoping to test the water in the juvie pond, be prepared to wait for an opening. Remember standing in line at the public swimming pool for a chance to do a cannonball off the diving board? That’s what it’s like for an adult writer who decides to write a YA or children’s novel. The list of those who have tried seems to grow daily: Joyce Carol Oates, Nick Hornby, Louise Erdrich, John Feinstein, Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson, Elmore Leonard, Henning Mankell, Robert B. Parker, Rick Riordan, Peter Abrahams—and that’s just for starters.

Clearly, something is happening here. Of that list of writers, the only one who has gone from middling success as an adult author to critical and popular acclaim as a children’s or YA author is Riordan, who writes the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (and who switched from mysteries to fantasy when he jumped ponds). The others remain bigger names in the adult world, but all of them have been the recipients of solid if not starred reviews in kiddie land. But why the switch? Multiple reasons would be my guess. An editor piqued a writer’s curiosity or fed an ego? Probably, at least in some cases. Latent J. K. Rowling effect, combined with a dawning recognition that the YA novel, after escaping death a few years ago, now seems hot? Definitely. A need to diversify one’s literary portfolio in light of bookstore closings and dire economic forecasts? That, too. The dream of maybe one day being an honored guest at an ALA Conference cocktail party? Not so much.

And then there’s James Patterson. The author of so many best-selling if utterly formulaic and often painfully hackneyed mysteries that he now employs coauthors to do the heavy lifting, Patterson has recently taken to turning out lavishly hyped if tepidly reviewed YA books. But Patterson made one crucial pond-jumping mistake. If you’re about to jump into a new pond, and you’re hoping to mix well with the resident fish, don’t pee in the pond before you jump. Patterson did that by making it known at various author functions that he had decided to write a YA book because he couldn’t find anything good to give his kids to read. That was Madonna’s line, too, uttered when she took a whirl at children’s books, but shouldn’t Patterson know better?

He might have consulted with Joyce Carol Oates before taking the plunge. Oates is our quintessential literary leapfrog, bounding from pond to pond with reckless abandon but always landing on a nicely furnished lily pad in a good neighborhood. Her prolificacy is legend, but her versatility is equally impressive. Oates writes everything, from National Book Award–winning literary fiction (Them) to gothic romances to historical fiction to a nonfiction celebration of boxing, and, most recently, to mysteries and YA novels. Most writers ask, “Why?” when pondering jumping into a new pond; Oates shrugs, “Why not?”

If Oates leads the league in total pond jumps, Michael Malone, one of my favorite writers, wins the crown for the longest jump. A critically acclaimed author of both literary fiction (Handling Sin) and mysteries (Time’s Witness), Malone leaped out of book publishing altogether and into soap-opera writing. His stint as head writer on One Life to Live earned him awards and acclaim from a new audience, but, fortunately, he later leapt back into the book world. The recent publication of Malone’s Four Corners of the Sky, his long-awaited sequel to Handling Sin, proves that the best pond jumpers are able to jump both forward and back.