Adverbs
By Daniel Handler, HarperCollins, 2006

Adverbs, the latest adult fiction book from Daniel Handler, is structured in the currently fashionable manner as a non-novel, a collection of loosely connected short stories grouped together into a single volume and called a novel. Handler’s book is less coherent than the typical novel-in-stories; character names and situations are carried over from story to story, but it’s often unclear (intentionally and self-consciously so) whether or not the characters and situations are one and the same from chapter to chapter.

In the first story, a man breaks up with his girlfriend and gets into a taxi, only to fall immediately and inexplicably in love with the cab driver. In the next story, a teenager pines over a popular girl who doesn’t really know he’s alive, only to fall somewhat in love with the young man he encounters while working at a movie theater. The stories continue on, tripping from one scenario to the next with not much of a narrative thread holding them together; Joe and Andrea and Keith and a whole cast of characters pop up over and over - or at least their names do - but they are unrecognizable from one story to another, and the stories are anything but cohesive.

The point is, of course, that narrative is for old people, and Adverbs has much loftier and fresher literary goals in mind. The book’s other gimmick - titling each story with an adverb (“Immediately,” “Symbolically,” “Often,” etc.) - gives a hint about those goals: these stories will explore love from a variety of angles, angles that can be summed up with one of those spicy, crucial parts of speech, the adverb. That’s not such a bad idea, had it been executed well, but often Handler’s take on love is so broad and shamelessly postmodern as to be ridiculous. In “Immediately,” Joe falls in love with his cab driver; he simply decides upon getting into the taxi that he wants to spend the rest of his life with a man he’s never seen before. Elsewhere, a woman inadvertently falls in love with a ghost, a boy falls in love with his sister’s boyfriend after seeing him naked in a shower room, a whole neighborhood falls in love with the unassuming guy next door and all sorts of other magical stuff goes on. In his need to be bizarre, Handler gives up any chance he had at achieving emotional resonance.

Stylistically, too, Adverbs is short of masterful. Handler uses repetition as a substitute for depth in his story construction. Not only do character names recycle, but imagery does as well. Birds (magpies in particular) are especially heavily leaned upon, but they never reach the level of true metaphor or symbol; they exist, like the semi-characters themselves, simply as a means to tie together essentially unrelated stories.

Handler is best known by his pen name, Lemony Snicket, under which he has written the Series of Unfortunate Events brand of kids’ books. Those books are characterized by a tone of ironic cynicism - they’re about a trio of youngsters who are subjected to humiliations and trials at the hands of wicked adults - that fits well with the mood of the day. Straight from the Tim Burton school of Roald Dahl imitation, they manage only to parrot half-heartedly Dahl’s darkness, minus much of the knowing wit. In this novel for adults, Handler has abandoned the spare style he uses for the kids’ stuff (there his style is closer to Hemingway than to Dahl) in favor of trendy, edgy prose. He denotes a teenager’s voice by writing in tremendously juvenile run-on sentences (see Elizabeth Crane’s books (also novels-in-stories) for evidence that this is a contemporary trope, even when the author should be old enough to know better), and his dialogue is peppered with non sequiturs and nonsensical conversational trains.

But Handler holds on to the magical sensibility of a children’s book even here. Ghosts exist in Adverbs, as does a powerful Snow Queen, who is, we are told, “an agent of the netherworld of Kata. In human form, she takes the human form of a woman. As her name implies, she can control all types of weather especially snow.” She’s important, too, because “if you miss your Snow Queen you might not appear in the love story anymore.” Whatever that means.

Handler does occasionally have a way with language. When he describes a New York street filled with yellow taxis as resembling an ear of corn, you can’t help but be impressed by the simile. You also can’t help getting the feeling, however, that Handler spent a moment congratulating himself after putting that simile on paper, and, in fact, the whole book has a self-congratulatory air. Here is a young writer, writing in the style of the day, at the top of his form according to the literati, and we should all sit back and bask in the affirming 21st-century glow of it all. That glow is a cold one, though, and for those who want some warmth from their novels there’s not much satisfaction to be found.

Copyright 2006 Ad Media Inc.