Adverbs: A Novel

I literally laughed and cried. This book is beautiful in a melancholy way. No, it's not an Unfortunate Events book; it's written for adults and is therefore not quite so straightforward or simple. Fantastic.

The back of this book proclaims, "This is a novel about love." And it is. No, it is not a cohesive love story, it is not a flighty "boy meets girl" romp, nor is it is not a "star-crossed lovers" drama. Instead it is like snapshots of love: noticing it suddenly here, and here, and here. Adverbs is a collection of beautifully quirky vignettes exploring the different ways we have of loving -- clearly, soundly, not particularly, collectively... Each "story" is interconnected with the others, but not in an obvious way - instead, little details recur throughout the book, including magpies, character names, ripped purses, and taxis. Read Adverbs in one sitting, straight through. Absorb Handler's uniquely expressive voice, his way of explaining things so matter-of-factly that you want to capture his voice to narrate your own life. Finish the book, close your eyes, take a break. Wait a little while, a few weeks or months. Lend the book to your best friend (but make sure she gives it back). Then go back and read it again, one chapter at a time. Pick through the details, marvel over Handler's beautifully crafted phrases and enjoy the rhythm of the language. Fall in love with this book. Love it briefly, love it immediately, love it wrongly, love it soundly, love it once, or love it obviously...

I raced through the first two-thirds of Adverbs and savored the remainder. I needed to think about it; digest it. It was messy, it represents San Francisco exactly as it is--weird; backward, full of strange characters and slightly, bizarrely dangerous. Mostly, though, this book is about love and how it makes you feel and what it does to you. In that respect and the odd magical realism that love puts you through--it's spot on. Adverbs is also my favorite book. If everything tied itself up neatly in the end, it would have been disappointing and unfaithful to the way life and love treats people who are actually swept up in it.

Daniel Handler's aka Lemony Snicket new novel, Adverbs is both funny and delightful. It's a collection of linked stories about love. The discovery of love, the slyness of love, the suddenness and the loss of love. Handler plays games with the reader; characters reappear throughout, subtly altered. Sometimes two entirely different characters will share a name and maybe an important trait. My favorites are Helena, the English novelist whose book hasn't really taken off and who is running out of money. Out of desperation she takes a teaching job offered by Andrea, one of Helena's husband's ex-girlfriends. I also liked Allison, the wife of a highly regarded cartoonist named Adrian. Allison is on her first Comics Cruise (a real thing) where cartoonists and their fans gather on a cruise ship for shop talk and fun in the sun. Adrian hates the idea and stays behind. Allison also hates the idea but she goes anyway. And there's Sam, who is only named in the next-to-last story but who also may be in the final segment. Sam shares traits with both Helena (Sam, too, has no money) and with Allison (she'd like to do violence to stupid people. Unfortunately for both Sam and Allison, they find most people stupid). Many of the male characters aren't sympathetic, although there is hope in Joe. Handler also inserts himself into several of the stories, addressing the reader directly, as in "My wife hates this record" or "this really happened, in exactly the place and the way I'm describing to you". This technique doesn't always work for me but Handler pulls it off here. Literary games don't always work for me either but again, Handler pulls it off. This is the best book I've read since Man Walks into a Room by Nicole Kraus.

You know how sometimes you read so much of an author that his tone of voice, his quirky eye for quirky things, his attachment to certain moods and turns of phrase and senses of humor become fully acclimated to your own tone of voice, your own quirky eye, your own moody and wordy and humorous attachments, at least in your own head, so that you forget that they came from somewhere and just think, "That's the way things are; this is the way I think about the way things are," and you think, "This is how the world is, to me; this is how I am, in the world," and then you pick up another book by that author and you think, "This is interesting, but, frankly, he's just saying what passes in my own mind, my own everyday mind, and how hard is that--I do it all the time," and it takes you a while to realize that the reason the earth isn't trembling as you read is not that you could have written this book just by being in the world, no, but that the book is written in the very language in which your mind has been taught to think, and you have to realize that before you can realize what new kinds of things it's saying to you this time? That's how I am with Daniel Handler. I don't love all his books. Of course, I am devoted to the splendid Series of Unfortunate Events. I enjoyed The Basic Eight very much, but it didn't place Handler in my pantheon of Writers Too Brilliant To Be True, alongside the likes of Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Haruki Murakami. And I was actively disappointed by Watch Your Mouth, which just didn't work, somehow. But last night I stayed up late finishing his most recent work, Adverbs, and I realized around 1:37am that all the barely conscious judgments I'd been passing on the book as I read, ranging from the enchanted to the skeptical, were not at all the point. The point is that this writer's writing--its voice, its perhaps irritating delight in words, particularly in how they warp the real into truer shapes, its willful confusion of the funny and the sad, its dead-on sense of the infuriating, its sublimation of its fury into wordplay, because where else is it going to go--this writing rewrote my own mental processes some time ago, and now Daniel Handler and I are in a relationship. Probably a permanent one. I'm living in his waking dream of the world. It's useless for me to say, "This book was really great" or "This book thinks it's too clever by half," because I might as well be giving a book report on the weather. That said, I could add that this is the first piece of Handler's writing under his own name that demonstrated to me how moving he can be. Never sentimental, of course, because sentiment has to believe on some level that it lives outside of wordplay, and nothing in a Handler novel does. But his chapters on the friendships between women were captivating--I was reminded of a Dorothy Parker story I have to look up to be sure it really exists--and by whatever devices and sleights of hand, the book did leave me with the sens