Many children’s books work hard to explain...

Many children’s books work hard to explain the world to kids, to imprint lowest-common-denominator truths on their minds. Chris Van Allsburg, for nearly 20 years one of our most idiosyncratic and commercially successful writers, continues to resist the trend. What explains his enduring appeal?

Ever since he was first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1979, he has shown himself to be a storyteller with a fine sense of irony, a rare commodity at a time when children’s publishing has as much to do with merchandising as with ideas. We keep reading him because his open-ended stories refuse to let us go; his ideas nag at us in the best, most provocative way. He prefers to see the world from a child’s point of view: wicked, glorious and more than a little hard to figure out.

Van Allsburg is the author as saboteur, eager to demolish the card house that parents often construct for their kids in the name of stability. Since he speaks to children, his tone is deceptively smooth, but the message is clear: The world is unpredictable, most adults are blind to possibility and around every corner lurks luck or heartbreak, danger and the unexpected. There are no happy endings, at most a small happiness, always tinged with wistful mystery.

With economical language and disciplined art, he promotes a provocative premise: There is no line between dreams and reality. Trickier still, there is no line between my dream and yours (at 47, Van Allsburg is just the right age to recall the Bob Dylan lyric, “You can be in my dream if I can be in yours”). Reality? Merely a desperate attempt on the part of the grown-ups to throw a lasso around experience. Nothing is quite that neat in his work. Van Allsburg’s characters slip in and out of the familiar world as swiftly as the young voyagers in C.S. Lewis’ classic series, “The Chronicles of Narnia.”

His best-known books (all published by Houghton Mifflin)--”The Polar Express” (1985), “Jumanji” (1981), “The Garden of Abdul Gasazi” (1979) and “The Witch’s Broom” (1992)--all echo the essential, classic stories we have heard before. The little boy at the center of “The Polar Express” travels in his dream to the faraway place where Santa Claus lives. He picks as his present a little silver bell, but to his somewhat bewildered sadness, his parents cannot hear it. They think the bell is broken. It is a tale not unlike the story of Peter Pan, in which children travel in their dreams to a faraway land, where they have an adventure their parents cannot comprehend.

In “The Garden of Abdul Gasazi,” Alan Mitz cares for the neighbor’s dog for the day and allows it to escape to the garden of a retired magician, who retaliates by turning the dog into a duck and by banishing them both. When the boy returns to tell the dog’s owner the bad news, the dog is in the yard. Alan gets a gentle sermon about magicians and deception from the kindly Miss Hester, just as Dorothy listened to Auntie Em and Uncle Henry telling her she had not been where she had been.

As for “Jumanji,” what is it if not a demon variation on “The Nutcracker”? This time, the toy is not a beloved gift but a discard; the journey is terrifying, not joyous; and the adults are dismissive, not welcoming, when the children return to the real world.

And surely Minna Shaw’s magic in “The Witch’s Broom” is a distant cousin to the sweepers in “Fantasia.”

But Van Allsburg reinvents each timeless idea, siphons off the cute, the sweet, the tidy and turns it back to us with deeper, more troubling complex emotions exposed. Good does not always triumph in these books; I worry about the next set of kids who discover the Jumanji board game, and I wish someone would listen to the man with the limp in “The Wreck of the Zephyr” (1983). Van Allsburg avoids dumb promises; his best stories have a tension to them, an unfinished quality that encourages children to talk and think about what they have read.

He does it by establishing an almost palpable tension between the words and the pictures. The stories usually set off in one direction and lurch in another at the last minute, with surprise endings that throw everything into question.

For example, the debate among my family at breakfast one recent morning centered on Minna Shaw and the broom that the witch left at her house. We all agreed it was a magic broom. But we wondered: Did it regenerate after the nasty neighbors burned it at the stake? Or did Minna simply sacrifice a plain old domestic broom to the flames to spare the enchanted one, which she painted white to resemble a ghost and scare the neighbors into leaving town?

The regeneration theory belonged to a 7-year-old, who argued fiercely, citing lines in the text and clues in the illustrations of “The Witch’s Broom.” The manipulation theory belonged to her father and me, who have the questionable advantage of age and tend to see things from a more practical standpoint. We made only a half-hearted stab at defending our position. I would prefer, of course, to embrace my daughter’s interpretation; a little magic is a tantalizing thing.

Van Allsburg’s remarkable art provides a reassuring counterpoint. The little boy in “The Garden of Abdul Gasazi” is bottom-weighted, with thick legs and heavy shoes, not the sort to be knocked over by bad fortune. The children in “Jumanji” live in a stolid house full of heavy, wide furniture and their parents dress in timeless adult style, Mom in a shirtwaist and pearls, Dad with that pen clipped to his white shirt pocket. The witch in “The Witch’s Broom” is hardly a scary hag; this one is lovely, with dark hair, strong features and smooth hands.

But nothing is quite as safe as it seems. The light in the pictures lends an eerie instability. There are highlights even in the black-and-white drawings that shimmer and entice, suggesting that the scene must have looked slightly different a moment ago, and will surely change once we turn the page.

And what about that white ring-eyed dog? He pops up everywhere; in Gasazi’s garden, at the wrong end of the witch’s broom, as a hand puppet in “The Polar Express,” a long-suffering pet (this time white, pure) in “The Sweetest Fig” (1993) and stuffed in “Jumanji.” His dependable presence is unsettling: How did he jump from one story to another?

None of Van Allsburg’s characters behave like those in more traditional children’s literature. Van Allsburg’s kids are hardly paragons of pre-adolescent virtue. They get bored easily, they misbehave; in “The Witch’s Broom,” they are as narrow-minded and petty as their elders. The adults range from the downright nasty to the merely dull. They may share a physical space with their offspring, but their hearts and minds are otherwise occupied. Bibot, the dentist in “The Sweetest Fig,” has no compassion: He withholds pain pills when an elderly patient confesses she has no money to pay him and refuses to pick up his little dog, Marcel, lest he shed a single white hair on his master’s navy blue suit. The parents in “Jumanji,” drawn from a child’s perspective, are decapitated stiffs, uttering their dull remonstrations about cleanliness and obedience from just out of frame. The literary-minded adults in “The Wreck of the Zephyr” insist that a shattered boat washed ashore in a storm, says an old man who knows better, because it was “easier for them” than considering his knowing tale about boats that could fly through the air.

Age constricts; a notion familiar to any child impatient with a rigid parent; as well as to that parent, who fears in some chilly room of his heart that it is so. Bibot is the clearest villain, a prig of a man, smothered by greed and envy, prepared to abandon even his dependent little dog for the dream of endless wealth. We have such a good time despising him that for once Van Allsburg allows the trick ending to take us where we want to go. The notion that there is no justice in the world is a familiar one both to children and their parents, and in “The Sweetest Fig,” revenge is truly sweet. With a kicker: Once all have got what was coming to them (and I will not give it away), you cannot help but wonder how they will behave. Better than in the old order? Or just as bad?

When the mix does not work--and in an odd way the near-misses illuminate the exquisite nature of the other books--it is because Van Allsburg settles for being clever. “Ben’s Dream” (1982) has all the Van Allsburg earmarks: a child who falls asleep, a dream that crosses over into someone else’s. But there is no emotional context, just a linear joke with some lovely line drawings. The same thing happens with his most recent effort, “Bad Day at Riverbend” (1995) in which the denizens of an Old West coloring book confront mysterious colorful scribblings (inspired by the crayon work of the author’s little girl). It is a conceit that barely justifies a thin story. One feels Van Allsburg is coasting. He can do better.

In “Just a Dream” (1993), for example, he manages a delicate balance of didacticism and deep, almost primitive, emotion. Walter is a slob, the kind of boy who can’t be bothered to throw his doughnut wrapper in a garbage can or sort the trash. He goes to sleep and dreams of an array of environmental horrors, until the reader wishes that he’d wise up and wake up. Finally he does: Instead of junk toys, he asks for a sapling for his birthday, just like the one that Rose, the little girl next door, had received.

The first time I read it to my daughter the last page was stuck to the cover, so I thought the story ended with a two-page illustration--Walter in bed beneath two imposing trees, a young man with a hand-mower nearby, the happy dream of a boy who now understands the importance of caring for his environment. A little pat, but nice. Except the next time I read it the page came unstuck, and I saw that the story went on:

“When Walter woke up, his bed was standing in the shade of two tall trees . . . a man pushed an old motorless lawn mower. . . .

“The man looked up at the rustling leaves. ‘My great-grandmother planted one of these trees,’ he said, ‘when she was a little girl.’

“Walter looked up at the leaves too, and realized where his bed had taken him. This was the future. . . . ‘I like it here,’ he told the man, then drifted off to sleep in the shade of the two giant trees--the trees he and Rose had planted so many years ago.”

One page, and there you have it: Love, family, memory, immortality, eternity. It joins a small collection of pages that make me cry: the last page of E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web”; the moment when Digory feeds his mother the magic apple in C.S. Lewis’ “The Magician’s Nephew” and the disclosure of the children’s fate at the end of “The Last Battle”; passages about determination and will in William Steig’s “Abel’s Island”; and a snippet about fierce mother love in “Brave Irene.”

There are plenty of books for kids that trade in cheap thrills--wacky stories, out-sized art, an obvious and overbearing moral preaching. They numb the brain, in the same way that the glowing rock turns a ship’s crew into monkeys in “The Wretched Stone” (1991), a story that I figure is an allegory about watching too much television.

Van Allsburg gives us something better. Why put a child to sleep with predictable plots and gonzo art when their brains are in happy overdrive, ready to imagine brooms out of thin air and ponder the extended fate of Bibot’s dog, Marcel? Van Allsburg, a master of evocative understatement, chooses instead to present the essential challenge of life: You’re here, it’s out of your control and you are, in the end, alone. It is up to you to give meaning to the unfolding story of your life.

KAREN STABINER will participate in the panel “Politics of Women’s Health” at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books today at 11 a.m. at UCLA.