Adverbs: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner..." (more)
Key Phrases: San Francisco, Snow Queen, Comics Cruise (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The qualities that draw millions to Lemony Snicket—absurdity, wicked humor, a love of wordplay—get adulterated in this elegant exploration of love. Handler brings linguistic pyrotechnics to a set of encounters: gay, straight, platonic and all degrees of dysfunctional. Amid the deadpan ("Character description: Appropriately tall. Could dress better.") and the exhausting ("Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner.") are moments of blithe poignancy: quoth a lone golfer, "Love is this sudden crash in your path, quick and to the point, and nearly always it leaves someone slain on the green." In "Obviously," a teenage boy pines for his co-worker at the multiplex while they both tear tickets for Kickass: The Movie. In "Briefly," the narrator, now married, recounts being 14 and infatuated with his big sister's boyfriend, Keith. "Truly" begins "This part's true," and features a character named Daniel Handler, who has an exchange about miracles with a novelist named Paula Sharp. Handler began his career with the coming-of-age novel The Basic Eight; this lovely, lilting book is a kind of After School Special for adults that dramatizes love's cross-purposes with panache: "Surely somebody will arrive, in a taxi perhaps, attractively, artfully, aggressively, or any other way it is done."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

In "Soundly," perhaps the most emotionally resonant of the 17 adverbially titled pieces that make up Daniel Handler's Adverbs, the narrator remembers what her driver's ed teacher once said a car horn should convey: "Not Move along, buddy or I am displeased but I am here. I am here, I am here, I am here!" That teacher has inadvertently offered up the theme of this jigsaw puzzle of a book about lonely people stepping gingerly through the smoldering volcanic debris field of love.

Handler -- better known as Lemony Snicket, the author of the enormously popular kid-lit "Series of Unfortunate Events" -- has given his adult readers a lot to ponder as they flip over these pieces and work to put them together. Within an atmosphere of impending doom, characters step forward with their attendant baggage, introduce themselves and tell us why true love is so elusive.

And the author tells us things, too -- mostly what love is, metaphorically speaking. Love, apparently, is a lot of different things, from saltwater taffy to acts of Camelot-style chivalry. In a devastating piece called "Briefly," a man who accidentally kills a magpie while playing golf recalls the aching memory of a boyhood crush: "Love is this sudden crash in your path, quick and to the point, and nearly always it leaves someone slain on the green."

Readers of Adverbs are asked to make a dizzying number of connections as they move through the process of putting it all together: Characters who appear early in the book return for reprise visits, or perhaps Handler has mischievously reused their names for totally unrelated characters. The author admits as much himself: "At the end of the novel, it's Joe who's in the taxi, falling in love with Andrea, although it might not be Andrea, or in any case it might not be the same Andrea, as Andrea is a very common name."

The connections -- both the obviously purposeful and the bizarrely tangential -- incorporate repeating story elements. Adverbs is teeming with comically named cocktails (Hong Kong Cobblers, Tipsy Mermaids), things avian (eggs, hummingbirds, lost parakeets and Yellow-billed magpies), along with numerous taxis, bars and diners, a ripped purse and a woman known as the "Snow Queen" who can freeze a man in his tracks with her "Cone of Frost." (Did Lemony just skate through?) When Adverbs works, it works brilliantly and poignantly, taking its ruminations on the complexity and fallibility of love to avian heights. In "Soundly," a dying woman and her friend negotiate a desperate turn of events in the twilight hours of their companionship. In "Naturally," a wrenching tale of loss and disappointment, a murdered man finds love after death only to lose it just as mundane folks do. Other pieces work less successfully, some coming off a little too linguistically cute and clever, or too oblique.

In the end, some readers will wonder why these pieces don't all come together in a satisfying way. But love is a messy thing. In truth, these stories tell us that love is best understood as neither a noun nor a verb. "The miracle is the adverbs," the narrator says in "Truly," "the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe." This bracing reality constitutes both the primary strength of Adverbs -- and its intrinsic flaw. The puzzle may never be completed because the pieces cannot all be there, and those that are, hardly ever connect the way we wish they would. But that is life and that is love.

Reviewed by Mark Dunn
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; First Edition edition (April 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060724412
• ISBN-13: 978-0060724412
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #567,743 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Get your adverbs here, May 2, 2006

By	Eric J. Lyman (Roma, Lazio Italy) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I didn't know about the connection between author Daniel Handler and his pseudonym Lemony Snicket until after I finished Adverbs, but I think I sensed a kinship between the two. Both are told with a certain deadpan humor, both wrestle the maximum meaning out of words and phrases, both stop just a hair short of becoming pedantic in their explanations.

Unfortunately, after a certain point, I think the unusual combination of characteristics under both names succeeds ... but at the expense of the narrative.

The biggest difference, of course, is that Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events is written for children (or, perhaps more accurately, at the parents who buy them for their children), while Adverbs is aimed at adults. And while the former explores some of the central themes of childhood -- fear of abandonment, need for approval, adventure, that sort of thing -- Adverbs focuses squarely on the main theme of adulthood: love.

The book is made up of 16 intersecting stories that, with witty pen and stiff upper lip, explore the frail state of love. The title of the 250-page volume comes from the fact that each chapter is named for the adverb that modifies the word love as it is described in that chapter.

I thought the first chapter -- entitled "Immediately" -- was the best, telling us about a couple on their way to hear a will read. Here's how it starts:

"Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner. We breathed it in, particularly me: the air was also full of smells and birds, but it was love, I was sure, that was tumbling down to my lungs, the heart's neighbors and confidants. Andrea was tall and angry. I was a little bit shorter. She smoked cigarettes. I worked in a store that sold things. We always walked to this same corner, Thirty -- seventh and what's -- it, Third Avenue, in New York, because it was easier to get a cab there, and the entire time we were in love." Nice.

Looking over the book again, I think the second chapter was probably my second favorite, and I think the third was the third best ...

... which tips me off to a trend: like many books held together by a clever device like the adverbs theme here, the veneer eventually wears thin and the story suffers. After some reflection, I think that if I read some intermediate story first, that might have become my favorite. If I read the first one last, it might have started to feel as weary as I did when I finally put the book aside.

If I had it to read over again, I'd leave it at my bedside and pick it up every third night or so. I don't want to undervalue Mr. Handler's writing, which is smart and efficient and fun to read. But I can't escape the feeling that because of the book's hallmark timing, vocabulary, and style it is damned to be good but not great.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For those locked in a modern romance with words, July 30, 2006

By	zugenia (Fayetteville, AR) - See all my reviews

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 sense that I'd just read as true an exposition of Love as a young, self-conscious, too clever, wordy person can find.

26 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Hard for me to like, September 30, 2006

By	PCM2 - See all my reviews

Billed as a novel, this is really more of a collection of short stories -- vignettes, really -- that are loosely connected by a number of themes.

The overarching theme, as Handler reminds us repeatedly, is love. But there are a number of other themes woven throughout the various narratives, including birds (magpies in particular), a volcano beneath San Francisco, fancy cocktails with exotic names, money, a Snow Queen, and some others I'm forgetting. Make any sense to you? Not me, either.

Many of the characters in the vignettes have the same names as one another, but it's seldom clear whether they're supposed to be the same people or different ones with the same names. Judging by the smug copy Handler has written for the inside of the dust jacket, this is intentional.

Finally, one can observe Mr. Handler's use of Adverbs. Cleverly, he almost never uses them, except when one of his characters is nearing some moment of epiphany in the story.

Clever, indeed, is the word for the whole package. It's all very clever. Clever, as Tyler Durden in "Fight Club" might observe: How's that working out for you, Mr. Handler?

Through maybe the first 30 pages of this book I thought I wasn't going to make it. I thought I would end up throwing it across the room. Why didn't I notice the gushing praise from David Eggers on the back cover? Why, when the smug, self-congratulatory Mr. Eggers is the one person whose good review could absolutely damn a book forever? A compliment from Mr. Eggers is enough to put most authors into the same category that I place Eggers himself; namely, people whose eyes I'd like to push into the backs of their skulls with my thumbs. But no, I didn't notice Eggers' review on the back of this book, and as soon as I started reading it I found myself nearly smothered by the smirking, clever prose of yet another Talented Young Author Who Winks And Thumbs His Nose At The Establishment.

But oh well. I stuck with it. I finished it. And by the end of it, I didn't think it was all that bad. Just hard to stomach, like eating a pound of chocolate mousse right before bed.