Adverbs: A Novel - Softcover

Daniel Handler has written three novels under his own name, including The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, and Adverbs, and many books under the name Lemony Snicket, including All the Wrong Questions, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and the picture book 13 Words.

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.