Tuesday, Sep. 09, 2008

The 39 Clues: The Next Harry Potter?

By Lev Grossman

In 1997 the Scholastic Corporation bought the U.S. rights to a young-adult fantasy novel by an unknown English author for $105,000. That was a lot of money at the time, especially to the not yet ultra-rich Joann Rowling, but it turned out to be the bargain of the century — that one, and probably this one too. Over the next decade or so Scholastic went on to print (spoiler alert!) over 140 million Harry Potter books. (Read about Harry Potter's last adventure here.)

Now Harry is living happily ever after, except for a few postscripts (like The Tales of Beedle the Bard, due out in December), and Scholastic is getting ready for its first major post-Harry Potter launch, a new series called The 39 Clues. But things will work a little differently this time. The rules in the magical land of young-adult publishing have changed. The 39 Clues isn't the second coming of Harry Potter. There won't be one.

Harry Potter and the Death of the Author

The 39 Clues is a series of novels about two orphans named Dan and Amy Cahill. At the start of the first book, The Maze of Bones, just now appearing in bookstores, their beloved grandmother Grace has just died, and all the far-flung members of the Cahill family have gathered round to hear the reading of the will. They are treated to the astounding revelation that the Cahills are in fact secretly the most powerful family in the world. It turns out that just about everybody important in the history of modern civilization — Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Harry Houdini — was actually a Cahill.

The secret of the family's power is hidden somewhere in the world. In Grace's will, each member of the family has been given a choice: either accept a legacy of a million dollars and walk away, no questions asked, or compete in a global scavenger hunt to find and claim the secret. Of course Amy, who's 14, and Dan, who's 11, take Door No. 2. So do six other teams of Cahills. All scamper off in search of the titular 39 clues, aiding and double-crossing and feuding with each other all the while. The hunt leads them to a lot of exotic locations (Philadelphia! Paris!) where they have subtly educational adventures.

It's all very entertaining, and the educational stuff goes down with only the faintest academic aftertaste. (David Levithan, executive editorial director at Scholastic and a young-adult author himself, calls The 39 Clues "subversively educational," by which he presumably means that kids won't notice they're learning, not that the books actually subvert any societal norms.) "It's very much about family dynamics," Levithan says. "That's the heart of it. The most relatable factor about it is that every kid thinks their family is just really strange and large and weird. The idea that you can be born into this family that has these secrets — almost every kid feels that way."

Whether he's right about that or not, Amy and Dan are certainly appealing — Dan is nerdy (he's an obsessive collector) and bratty but surprisingly resourceful, and Amy is brilliant but touchingly shy and insecure. The plot ticks along with the iron reliability of an atomic clock. If you forcibly interbred Lemony Snicket and National Treasure and chose the most viable of their mutant offspring, you might come up with something like The 39 Clues. Scholastic is printing a first run of a million copies and holding launch events in seven cities.

Levithan is adamant about not comparing The 39 Clues to its famous older sibling. "We don't ever dream about having another Harry Potter," he says. But the series does share some cosmetic similarities with Rowling's. Harry is, like Amy and Dan, an orphan who discovers that his family history makes him part of a secret, powerful world. The Cahill family is divided into four branches, each with its own distinct personality, just as Hogwarts is divided into four distinct houses. But in another sense Levithan is very right: if you look under the hood you'll find that Scholastic has engineered The 39 Clues to work very differently from the way Harry Potter did.

And engineered is the word. The 39 Clues is, like some lab-grown genetically engineered life-form, a series without a real author. J.K. Rowling conceived Harry Potter on a crowded, four-hour-delayed train trip between Manchester and London. The 39 Clues was born about three years ago in a corporate boardroom. Levithan runs a weekly "idea group" at Scholastic — "basically, about a dozen editors get together every week, and we just brainstorm ideas," he explains. Amy and Dan were one of those brainstorms. (Originally the series was called The 79 Clues before Levithan and co. decided to scale it back, probably wisely.) The 39 Clues is overseen by a team of a dozen Scholastic employees, including four editors. Each book in the series will be written by a different author, who will be retained on a contract basis.

It's hardly a new approach — young-adult series have often been written by multiple authors under contract, ever since the Bobbsey Twins. The Maze of Bones is by Rick Riordan, a former middle school history teacher who is the author of the best-selling Percy Jackson series, and who also helped flesh out ideas for the other books in the 39 Clues series. "They were very secretive," Riordan says. "They did nondisclosure agreements. I felt like I was working for the CIA!" Riordan's involvement with Amy and Dan will end when Maze goes on sale Sept. 9. "It's a little bittersweet not to take it all the way," he says. "But on the other hand it just wouldn't be humanly possible for one writer to write all those books in the amount of time we're talking about."

That's one of the advantages of doing business this way, without a single author. By rotating writers, Scholastic can put out 39 Clues novels at Gatling-gun speeds: there will be a total of 10, a new one appearing every three or four months. Another advantage is that it allows Scholastic to retain ownership and control of the intellectual property they're selling. Harry Potter quickly made J.K. Rowling one of the richest women in the world. But Amy and Dan are company property. In the post-Potter world, publishers realize there's too much money at stake to risk letting a mere author get his or her ink-stained hands on it.

But there's also a disadvantage. The post-author approach gives The 39 Clues a synthetic, focus-grouped quality. It's nothing you can easily point to. It's just the absence of anything risky or anything strange. The Maze of Bones is scrupulously smooth and generic and meticulously calculated to appeal to everyone and offend no one. As the product of a corporate hivemind, it isn't stamped with the signature quirks of a single distinctive authorial sensibility. If it were a baby it wouldn't have a belly button.

That doesn't make The 39 Clues hard to read. But it does make it hard to fall in love with.

Beyond the First Dimension

In June the 39 Clues team got a major boost: DreamWorks acquired the film rights, with Steven Spielberg planning to produce and direct. "The 39 Clues takes creative leaps to expand the story experience from the pages of the books to multiple stages of discovery and imagination," Spielberg said, in an uncharacteristically robotic statement. "We have the opportunity to develop this property that says 'film,' 'family,' 'fun' and 'franchise.' "

Which brings us to the second, more unusual aspect of The 39 Clues: those "multiple stages of discovery and imagination" Spielberg mentioned. When you buy a copy of The Maze of Bones, you'll find a pocket in the inside front cover that contains a pack of six trading cards. If you like them, you can buy more — there are 355 cards in all — and trade them with your friends. The cards come with various points and clues and puzzles on them, in a system so complicated you would have to be 13 years old or younger to understand it. With cards in hand you can visit a website — the39clues.com — where you can create an account and play an online game that involves finding more clues. This makes you eligible to win cash prizes. If you find all 39 clues you could win the grand prize of $10,000. Which you could maybe use to buy yourself a 39 Clues backpack.

In other words, while it's ostensibly a series of books, The 39 Clues arrives already encased in an exoskeleton of extraliterary material: trading cards, online game, sweepstakes, movie, merchandise. Levithan calls this approach "multi-dimensional publishing." "We are trying to create a new model for publishing and launch it in the biggest way possible," he explains. "Which for us is pretty big." The 39 Clues has been Pokemonetized.

The strategy here is: more is more; success by any medium necessary. For Scholastic those ancillary products aren't just additional sources of revenue — though they're sure as shootin' that too — they enhance the overall entertainment experience. "That was really the genesis of this," Riordan says. "How can we make an experience that's not simply the book, that's all these other elements as well, that get the reader involved in a number of different ways — that really get kids where they live? What are they interested in, and how can we get them hooked into this series?" After all, Harry Potter evolved most of these accoutrements over the lifetime of the series. So for The 39 Clues, why not build them right in, right from the start?

But it's hard not to suspect that in this case more just might possibly be less — that with every extra dimension you pile onto The 39 Clues, it doesn't become more of a rich, immersive experience; instead the book at the heart of its little universe just becomes a little less of a book. Levithan argues that the principle of the thing remains the same, regardless of the media it's packaged in. "The technology changes, but it's all about being in your backyard, being Luke Skywalker and Han Solo," he says. "It's that role-playing; it's about being involved in a story. That's what kids want." But what if those extra dimensions send kids the message that for a story to feel real, a mere book isn't enough? With its glossy clear plastic front cover, The Maze of Bones hardly looks like a book at all. It looks like a toy. Like Voldemort and his horcruxes, its soul has been divided among multiple vessels. But what Voldemort failed to understand, of course, is that each division diminishes the whole.

The irony of The 39 Clues is that, like practically all children's entertainment, the books themselves pay lip service to the beauty and value of books. Amy is an obsessive reader — "Young lady, close that book!" her aunt snaps at her in the second chapter of The Maze of Bones. Likewise, one of the novel's key scenes takes place in grandmother Grace's secret library. "She loved books," we learn. "She loved them very much." But would Amy or Grace have picked up The Maze of Bones? Scholastic's strategy seems to be predicated on the idea that kids don't actually like to read at all, that they have to be bribed to do it with trading cards and video games and cash. Undoubtedly there are many lessons publishers can learn from Harry Potter. But that isn't one of them.