Adverbs: A Novel

By Daniel Handler

Hello.

I am Daniel Handler, the author of this book. Did you know that authors often write the summaries that appear on their book's dust jacket? You might want to think about that the next time you read something like, "A dazzling page-turner, this novel shows an internationally acclaimed storyteller at the height of his astonishing powers."

Adverbs is a novel about love -- a bunch of different people, in and out of different kinds of love. At the start of the novel, Andrea is in love with David -- or maybe it's Joe -- who instead falls in love with Peter in a taxi. 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. So is Allison, who is married to Adrian in the middle of the novel, although in the middle of the ocean she considers a fling with Keith and also with Steve, whom she meets in an automobile, unless it's not the same Allison who meets the Snow Queen in a casino, or the same Steve who meets Eddie in the middle of the forest. . . .

It might sound confusing, but that's love, and as the author -- me -- says, "It is not the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done." This novel is about people trying to find love in the ways it is done before the volcano erupts and the miracle ends. Yes, there's a volcano in the novel. In my opinion a volcano automatically makes a story more interesting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 6, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061983504

Daniel Handler

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.

Book preview

immediately

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 the 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, the entire time we were in love.

You must be nervous, she said when we’d walked about two puffs.

Yes, I said. "I am nervous. I’ve never been to a reading of a will. I didn’t even know they still did things like this, read wills. I thought it was, I don’t know, a movie thing. In a movie. Do you think everybody will be dressed up?"

Who cares? Andrea said. She threw down her cigarette and ground it out with the heel of her shoe like a new kind of halfhearted dance. Look, she said, and shaded her eyes with her hand for a minute like she was actually looking at something. I turned my head to see. "I just mean, look, she said, cupping my head with her hand. The expression I mean. Look, I’m trying to be nice, but I’m scatterbrained right now, if you know what I mean. I’m frightened by your behavior. I woke up this morning and you said good morning and I said good morning, what do you feel like doing today and you said well I sort of have to do this thing and I said what thing and you said go to the reading of my father’s will and I said what are you talking about and then you told me your dad died. This morning. I mean, he died two weeks ago but that’s when you told me. That’s when you told me. I’m trying to think that you just must be in shock that your dad died but it’s very, very, very, very, very, very difficult."

He’s not really, I said, my dad.

Three cars went by.

What do you mean? she asked. What are you talking about? What could you possibly mean? He is your biological father and raised you, along with your mother, in the same house, for eighteen years. He carves the turkey at Thanksgiving and when I met him three years ago I said it’s so nice to meet your father and he didn’t even blink. How can you say that? What can you mean?

I don’t know, I said, and we reached the corner. The street was a yellow streak, however many yards wide, cabs and cabs and cabs and the occasional car that wasn’t a cab so the whole thing looked like a scarcely-been-touched ear of corn. I put my hand up and one stopped. I opened the back door and Andrea just looked at me. I put one knee into the cab, half-sitting in it, almost kneeling as if the cabdriver, whom you’ll meet in a minute, had just brought me up curbside to ask this tall angry woman to marry me. She wasn’t going to say yes, I realized. She was never going to say yes.

Why are you acting this way? she said. You’ve never acted this way. Usually you’re, I don’t know. Usually we’re eating at diners and taking money out of our ATM machines, a normal person. What is—

You don’t have a chance, I said, to act like this in a diner.

Please stop, she said. She smeared one finger underneath her eye, although she wasn’t crying, just finishing a finger painting of herself. She was done. This is worse than the last time, she said.

I think I should go to this thing by myself, I said, and sat more. I think you should go home to the middle of the block and I’ll go someplace in this cab. I’ll be back later or something.

What do you— She stood on the corner and wiped her eye again but now she was crying. Somehow she was crying by the time we reached the same corner and were almost all the way into a cab. I’m going, I said, and shut the door. She stared at me through the window like I was maybe nothing. The cabdriver asked me where I wanted to go and I told him Seventy-ninth Street and then I apologized for making him wait like that at the corner and told him I would give him an extra couple of bucks or something. Don’t worry about it, he said, and looked at me in the rearview mirror, a polite smile. His eyes veered off my reflection and onto the reflection of the traffic behind us, so we could merge, and we merged, and that’s when, immediately, I fell in love with my cabdriver.

I changed my mind, I told him. Then I decided I shouldn’t tell him, not yet. His cab number was 6J108. His first name was Peter, I saw, and his last name looked like somebody had just dropped their forearm onto the typewriter keyboard, someplace in Europe I guess. Penn Station. I have to go somewhere. I felt the weight of the lie I had told Andrea, enormous and undeserved, and vowed I’d never do something like that again. But not telling Peter everything that was in my heart wasn’t a lie, right? That was just good timing. That was just being sensitive. I don’t have to go somewhere, I said, "not really. But I think I should go somewhere."

Okay, he said. It didn’t make a difference to him, and I loved him all the more for it. We turned left.

You have pretty eyes, I said.

Yeah, Peter said. It’s pretty nice. Since they cleaned it up.

So you’ve had surgery? I said. That’s okay. Some people think it’s vanity, but I don’t think it’s any more vain than buying a sweater. It’s funny we’re talking about sweaters, because I lost one in a taxi once. It was blue, a nice shade of blue. Andrea and I—that’s the girl, Andrea, who kept you waiting because I was breaking up with her—we were first going out. This was maybe three years ago. We caught a cab at the very same corner, actually, where I met you, Peter. And we were chatting about this and that, on our way to a party. I think a party, and we started kissing, and you know how that goes.

Shit! Peter said. Somebody in front of us had done something.

I’m sorry, I said. I don’t mean to distract you. To make a long story short we lost the sweater.

If it’s okay, Peter said and pulled up to the curb. To my dismay we were there already. I rolled down the window to get a better look. Penn Station swerved to the left, and for a moment I thought there had been another catastrophe, but it was just me, swerving to the right. Peter was parking the cab in a rare empty spot across the street, one kernel of corn sticking in the gap between somebody’s teeth. I gotta have a cup of coffee, Peter explained. So I’m going to stop here, if it’s okay?

The clock in his car hadn’t adjusted to daylight saving time yet and said it was four-fifteen when it was really five-fifteen. Peter probably didn’t have time to fiddle with it, or it was tricky, as car clocks are. I didn’t mind. You can’t mind these things, you just can’t, for to dislike what makes a person human is to dislike all humans, or at least other people who can’t work clocks. You have to love the whole person, if you are truly in love. If you are going to take a lifelong journey with somebody, you can’t mind if the other person believes they are leaving for that journey an hour earlier than you, as long as truly, in the real world, you are both leaving at exactly the same time.

He turned to face me and I saw what I owed him. Here you go, I said, opening my wallet and handing him something. It was risky not to look at the bill, but I wanted him to know that I considered the commercial aspect of our relationship over and done with. Here you go, I said again, because a garbage truck was going by and I couldn’t be sure he had heard me the first time, "and yes. It’s more than okay. I would love to have a cup of coffee with you."

Peter was already outside, looking up and down the street and waiting for me to leave the cab and join him. I stepped out and everything looked ugly, spots of gum on the street and smoke in all the oxygen. They say that when you’re really in love, the world becomes gossamer and gorgeous, but in my experience—with Peter, and, I suppose, in a more naïve time in my life, with Andrea and Bob Dylan—the world gets grimy, and the love object is in stark relief from the surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street, and why wouldn’t you pick it up if it appeared in a cab? Finders keepers is what they say, and I wanted to be kept. I could see, in this stark relief, every inch of Peter’s clothing as he nodded politely to me and began to walk toward a grimy little diner place, Sal’s. Black jeans. A sort of olive-green jacket, with a rip on one of the elbows covered in masking tape. Pretty, pretty, pretty.

I won’t bore you with the details of Sal’s. Peter walked ahead of me to a booth and, after wondering if I dared sit next to him rather than across, I slid into the across seat. Best to give him space. I didn’t let the fact that I apparently no longer lived at Thirty-seventh and what’s-it pressure us into moving in together. I knew I could probably find a studio, month-to-month. Ridiculous maybe, but if you live in New York, real estate decisions can often supersede any other issues in a relationship, and it can be ugly, ugly. Two coffees, I told somebody who worked at Sal’s, and they brought them at the exact same time.

Um, Peter said. He looked confused.

I understand, I said. It’s overwhelming, isn’t it? I’m sorry, I’ll shut up. You talk. Milk?

I don’t have a lot of time, Peter said, taking it black. I made a note for the coffees we’d drink in the future. I’m sort of on a schedule.

I understand, I said. We can just take it easy. I should probably catch a train at some point, see my dad, tell him what happened.

Okay, Peter said, but I could tell it wasn’t okay. He was looking over my shoulder, making a little jiggling motion with a clasped hand, like he was running a pen through the air.

I guess I could say it in a letter, I agreed, if that would help things any. The check came and I threw another bill on it without looking. But it’s really quite simple. Amazing, isn’t it, that something like this happens so frequently yet it boils down to three simple words.

Yeah, um, okay, Peter said, and swallowed the rest of his coffee. He was bracing himself, I realized. He thought maybe I would reject him. I reached across the table, over the bill, which I now noticed was a five, and tried to take one of his sweetly veined hands. He pulled away, stood up, snakebit.

What are you, he said, some kind of faggot?

Not if it upsets you so much, I said. I remained sitting, looking up at him like a visit to a volcano, my Vesuvius, my Mauna Loa, spouting love lava all over this ugly, ugly town. "Labels, Peter. That’s all. Labels. You know?"

How the hell you know my name? he asked and backed up five steps. He bumped up against somebody, turned around quickly with a half-wave of apology. It was somebody he didn’t know. He had bumped up against a stranger. How the hell you know my name?

Peter! I cried out, and he left me in Sal’s. I hurried the length of this stupid restaurant. Why had I come here? Why not show him a little respect, a salad, sushi? I had the money. I could spend it all on him, my Fuji, my Etna, what did it matter? My father wasn’t dead, but when he died I would surely get something, and by then, I was positive, I’d be assistant manager. We could manage. This real estate jungle couldn’t tear us apart. Peter!

But Peter was already at his cab, looking at the ground and shaking his head in a tired, self-hating gesture. Denial, probably, the great exhauster, or maybe just a weary glance at all that sidewalk gum. The world was caving in on him, too, but my love wanted to run for it. Afraid of commitment, like all single men, he wanted to slipstream forever, picking up whatever stranger spotted him first. Peter! Without answering, he took his black jeans and jumped into his cab and merged, looking, I knew, into his rearview mirror at the reflection of traffic swarming around us.

I love you! I called. Peter went by, and then a bus, with black smoke behind it like the appearance of an evil queen. For a moment Penn Station shook in turmoil, a bubbling and gaseous Penn Station, but then the smoke cleared and the building was fully upright, proud as the truth printed out in big bright stencils: 6J108. I would find him, my Mount St. Helens, I could find him anywhere. He was a landmark. I waved both arms in the air, joyous giddiness for all the cars to see: Peter, Peter, Peter. I stood at the curb and waved, semaphored, signaled. I hailed him, my active mountain, my hole in the sidewalk that led to the center of the world. I knew if I waved long enough he would pull over and take me where I wanted to go.

obviously

The movie was kickass, which was appropriate, because tonight it was called Kickass: The Movie. It was a sort of action-adventure thing starring two women and one man, and another man who was the villain, and they all said funny lines sometimes, so I guess you could call it an action-adventure comedy except it was not a comedy in the traditional, classical sense, not in the way Ms. Wylie called it. Lila and I were in the same English class and we both worked Saturdays and Thursday nights at the Sovereign Cinemaplex, and I guess if I were a little braver I would have asked her something like, "Do you think Ms. Wylie, who we both have fourth period, would call Kickass: The Movie a comedy in the traditional, classical sense?" and we could have that conversation, and it would lead to other conversations, during the flat and lonely times in the Sovereign, when all the people had paid their money and bought their girlfriends popcorn and handed their tickets either to Lila, if they used the right-hand escalator, or to me at the left-hand one, to be torn in half, the emptied-out times when all the happy people were happy in the dark, and Lila and I just stood around at the bottom of the whirring escalators, taking nobody up and up and up for the big show. But the thing is, that line about Ms. Wylie is sort of lame, and I think Lila would just roll her eyes, which are green and thick with black eyeliner and beautiful.

Ask me why people go to the movies. You won’t ask, right? Because it’s obvious. There is nothing complicated about why people would stop driving around Mercer Island, staring out their car windows at those black, petrified parking lots with the birds sulking in the garbage, and come inside where it’s warm and where Kickass: The Movie is playing on two screens at 11:00, 11:45, 1:00, 1:45, blah blah blah, you can see it very clearly from the left-hand escalator and I’ve looked at it a million times. It’s not complicated. First you meet these two guys, one famous and one black, and guess which one dies in the first five minutes? Obvious. And they’re partners, I forgot to say, and the big white guy who always plays the Chief is playing the Chief, and he says the famous guy has to train these two women rookies, one of whom used to be a stripper and the other one I forget. I mean, it’s based on practically the most famous TV show ever, so even if it was complicated you could just stay inside your crampy house and flip channels for five minutes and find an episode which would explain it all for you in about ten kickass seconds, and it’s not complicated. It’s not. Even on Thursdays it’s packed. The villain wants to blow up a stadium full of innocent baseball fans, and guess if he succeeds or if the two women who have to wear tight leather pants as part of an undercover operation manage to stop him, and guess if the famous guy gets to use that top-secret mini-submarine we got to see in the opening credits. Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Obvious.

The only reason I’m blah-blah talking about it is so that you get what kind of night it was. Late, is what kind, but also obvious, and the obvious part was sort of messing with the kickass part, if you know what I mean. Like, just for instance, standing ten feet away from Lila was sort of kickass, with her nails drumming on the box with the slot in it where we put everything that we rip in half, and with her blue-eyed beauty and with the gum she was chewing and with how lovely she was, in that way that makes you want to find something else lovely just so you can give it to her and see how really kickass it is to have two lovely things next to each other in the Sovereign Cinemaplex. But the kickassness of Lila was a sort of muted kickassness, a kickassness tainted with melancholy, because there was also the obvious part, which was named Keith.

Keith. Unchivalrous Keith. Keith who picked her up from work every night, and who, if this was Kickass: The Movie, would have a little fuzz of mustache so that we would know what an asshole he was, except this being the real-life Seattle Metropolitan Area there was no way anybody could tell and so he just drove up to the Sovereign and beeped his horn and Lila just pushed open the swinging glass doors with the stupid sticker-heads of all the famous people stuck to them and ran out into the night of Keith without anybody running after her and saying, Don’t go out there to Keith! The boy who has stood by you, at the left-hand escalator, for nine Thursdays and eight Saturdays, loves you very much, plus his chivalry! Which is the kickass part on my end, the part I think about every Lila moment, from the first bell for Ms. Wylie to the tearing of every little ticket that is handed to me: the total King Arthur chivalry that sits deep in my puny, frantic heart. Example of chivalry, why am I working at the Sovereign? What is the money for? To buy flowers for Lila and to give them to her. Keith? Honk honk honk, please come running out of the Cinemaplex doors and jump into the seat next to me where there are no flowers and I won’t even tell you how nice you look, I bet. But my secret special kickass chivalry is tainted, obviously, by obviousness. And it’s the obvious thing that it’s not going to happen. Because there might be a suburb of Seattle where a girl says, Oh my god! Flowers? You are chivalrous, Joe, and then I win and she doesn’t care that Keith has one of those all-terrain things that will come in so handy when the world ends and we need a nine-thousand-cylinder engine to drive over the hordes of bloodthirsty mutants crawling all over the video-game landscape, or maybe there’s a suburb of Seattle where Lila wouldn’t care whether or not her chivalrous suitor was wearing a fucking WELCOME TO THE BIG SHOW! button on a red why-the-hell-is-it-fireproof Sovereign Cinemaplex vest which is sort of blocking the signals of that hungry heart of mine, and Lila and I drive around this other suburb of Seattle in a car I take care of myself on weekends and tell each other a big bag of secrets we’ve been hiding underneath the beds our parents bought us, tossing and turning over its poky burlap creases and staring out of the window screens at a spooky blue moon that is beaming down secret New York bus tickets of a grown-up love future, and then someplace where the sun is setting or rising she takes her top off, but I don’t live in that suburb of Seattle. I live on Mercer Island, and here we just tear tickets and wait to watch her go home.

Here I was maybe forty minutes ago, sort of claustrophobed in the gap between the kickass movie world where Lila dumps the guy with the smarmy mustache and the obvious one where it just keeps getting later. It was the last show and were I to guess it was just the moment where the stripper woman is forcing the hired-sunglasses dude to tell her who sent him to mess up all the chrome in her apartment where she sits in a towel and stares at a picture of her brother who was killed in a motorcycle accident, when Lila and I see this guy with his hands behind his back walking very slowly across the Sovereign carpet staring straight down like the chivalrous code of the wisdom of the ancients

Reviews for Adverbs

[ajbraithwaite_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I wasn't sure about this book when I started it, but its motifs, repetitions, and rotating cast of characters got under my skin. None of them were hugely likeable, but they were all hugely human.

[gwendydd · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I don't know what I think of this book..... I read it all the way through, and I never found myself arguing with it or anything, but I didn't exactly fall in love with it either. There is some fun wordplay, and not surprisingly Daniel Holder blends the line between author and narrator in some fairly interesting ways..... but a lot of it didn't make much sense and there was never really a coherent storyline or anything.The audiobook is read by one of my favorite narrators, Oliver Wyman. I might have enjoyed it a lot less without Wyman's narration.

[megantron-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I think I try to be even-handed in my reviews, so I don't say this lightly: This is the worst book I've ever read and I judge the fuck out of anyone who likes it. Daniel Handler should stick to writing children's novels because honestly, he really sucks at fiction for adults. Spamming the same word 50 times on a page is neither profound nor stylistically interesting.The only good thing about this book is the cover, which is designed by the incomparable Daniel Clowes.

[fogcityite · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is like candy. Sweet, playful, and you just want one more...

[cassielm_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I thought this book was beautifully written and very unusual. Each individual chapter was like a long prose-poem and could easily be read just by itself. The whole book also worked as a whole, with arcing issues and themes intertwined in every story. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, necessarily. It's not a particularly easy read - the plot (if there is one) is confused and it's very difficult to keep track of the characters - are they different people with the same name? Or are they the same people every time they show up? Doe it really matter? Couldn't they just be anyone? I do think it's a lovely and meditative book though. I really enjoyed reading it.

[librarybrandy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I may be one of the few people who really liked this book. It's not the best book in the world, sure. But it was the first grown-up Handler book I read, so that might make me a bit kinder toward it. It's a collection of interrelated short stories that collectively tell the story of a romance, or several romances. It doesn't really come together cohesively--but when has a relationship ever done that?

[themulhern · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

In the Series of Unfortunate Events books Daniel Handler achieves a unique, and remarkably pleasing, voice. In this book, he fails utterly.

[kairosdreaming · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I am utterly and totally confused by this book. To start off this review, I think a quote from the author about this book would be appropriate.Quoth Handler "Yes, there's a volcano in the novel. In my opinion a volcano automatically makes a story more interesting." And there is a volcano in the novel, it seems to be one of his favorite things to talk about. In addition to this there is an abundance of birds, alcohol, and taxis.I'd like to provide a timeline and a list of characters but the story is so jambled it wouldn't make sense. The characters all reoccur during the novel but are so unmemorable you can't keep track of who's who. In addition, some seem to have mystical powers in what is otherwise, a realistic fiction type book.The novel is supposed to be about love, different forms and presentations of it. However, if Handler's love is supposed to be real love it scares me. Most of his characters are stalkerish in quality and their love is very superficial. There are several divorces, break ups, hook ups and just plain fake love. At the end it seems several of the female characters are pregnant and possibly this means another type of love to the author.Handler's writing style is very disjointed. I think he tries to be more flowery and "hip" with his writing than he needs to be. It jumps around so much that you just get lost and confused. The book, at 272 pages went on way too long for my tastes. If you like the odd and random type of book go ahead and read, otherwise I recommend spending your time on a better piece of literature.

[gaskella_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This author is best known as the writer of the fun Lemony Snicket series of novels for children. I’ve read the first Lemony Snicket novel, and heard the audiobook narrated by Tim Curry, (I just love his voice!) and one day intend to read the rest of the series. The film, which combines the first three novels is immensely stylish and is a favourite at Gaskell Towers too. In these books, Handler has a fabulous and quirky narrative style, telling the story of the three Baudelaire orphans who have a series of unfortunate events happen to them.So after that preamble, you may be interested to hear that Handler has written some adult novels under his own name. You would also expect some off-beat humour and full-on quirkiness and Adverbs doesn’t disappoint.The novel is really a series of short stories, mostly linked, sharing characters and a timeline. Each chapter is titled with an adverb, which occurs physically in the text or in character in that story, including: obviously, particularly, briefly, naturally and symbolically to name a few. Do you know the parlour game Adverbs? You have to act in the style of a particular adverb for the others to work out – well this book is a bit like that!One of my favourite characters, Helena first crops up in the story Particularly in which she ends up working for her husband’s ex, teaching in a school …"She and her husband needed to buy things pretty much on a regular basis. This teaching job did not pay a lot of money, because, let’s face it, nobody gives a flying fuck about education, but it was a temporary position. Helena had been told it would last until the money ran out. From Helena’s experience, she would say the money was going to run out in about nine days.‘It’s a temporary position, like I told you,’ said Andrea, who had said no such thing. ‘Pretty much what happens is, you facilitate the creative expression part. You’re a creative expression facilitator. Get it?’Andrea was an ex-girlfriend of Helena’s husband, so she said ‘Get it?’ like one might say, ‘The same man has seen us both naked, and prefers you, bitch!’ ‘Of course I get it,’ Helena said, but she sighed.Things like this had not happened to her in England. She could not explain the difference, perhaps it was because there wasn’t one. Certainly England had castles, but Helena had not lived in them, although memories of her British life had become more and more glamorous the longer she hung out at hideous places like this."There’s a rich cast of characters who fall in and out of love, requited and unrequited, from a chivalric teenage crush to being immediately smitten with love at first sight. There are all kinds of love too, from full-on romantic to platonic, and ghostly too.Despite being called Adverbs, Handler doesn’t use many of them – I gather that using too many adverbs is considered bad form for proper authors – Elmore Leonard says, ‘Using adverbs is a mortal sin’ in his slim tome 10 Rules of Writing.Adverbs is also a strange book that happens to be full of magpies literally – it is obsessed with these colourful birds and their kleptomaniac character they crop up throughout as a kind of birdy glue – and dangle sentences at you like wonderful shiny jewels: "Love can smack you like a seagull, and pour all over your feet like junk mail."How fabulous is that! Like all proper good metafiction, Handler partially narrates the story, and crops up as himself too. His narration is similarly knowing as that of his alter-ego Lemony Snicket, intimating that he knows what will really happen and he’s not letting on. As he is so much an integral part of the novel perhaps, the female characters tend to dominate the rest, but they’re all interesting so that’s not a bad thing.It is also full of advice on life in general: "You have to be careful when you say what you like two weeks before your birthday. You say birds you’ll get birds. You say the new album by the Prowlers and you better not buy it yourself because it’ll be waiting for you in the bag from Zodiac records…"There was much I really liked about this book. At the risk of sounding like Forrest Gump, it was a little like a box of chocolates – I liked some stories and characters far more than others. However, the quirk factor was right for me, and the literary tricksiness was right up my street, so I will look out for more by this interesting chap.

[rrriles · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

About the most self-conscious collection of stories one could hope to run across. What begins as playful literary hooliganism ends in a pseudo-masturbatory po-mo-rama.That said, it was rather enjoyable as those things go.

[tinuola_victoria · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It's okay, a little bit rambling and pompously awkward in places. I like the unique structure and the cleverly titled chapters. There is one very touching story out of the many in this book.

[sweetiegherkin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I’m not sure what to say about this book – it is kind of odd and quirky, although I expected this from the man who writes children’s books under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket. However, I found the Snicket books quirky in a darkly humorous but understandable way. In this case, a lot of the book had me scratching my head, furrowing my brow, and say “huh?” The book is a collection of short (sometimes very short) stories supposedly about love (some I would argue are more about friendship or other topics than romantic love). The stories themselves are mostly oddly humorous, with the occasional pathos thrown in for good measure. What had me confused was trying to figure out how, if at all, the stories were all connected. You see, Handler would often repeat names for characters over and over again, and it was hard to tell when this was the same Andrea, for instance, as a previous story or a brand new one. If it appeared to be the same character, it was hard to tell where this story fit in relation time-wise to the other story about the seemingly same character. “Truly,” in my opinion, belonged as either the first or last story of the bunch, instead of just thrown in the middle, as this story seemed to give the most explanation for what the book was trying to do. Overall, I enjoyed the quirky humor, but I would have preferred if there was one coherent story or a bunch of completely unconnected stories rather than the bizarre, possibly related string of stories presented.

[amzzz_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A book that rather reminds me of Julian Barnes' "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters", Adverbs is generally very skilfully written and offers some great insights about love. At times the links seem a little forced and a little obvious.

[emily3steed · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I HATED THIS BOOK. HATED. I was hoping that I'd like it - Daniel Handler is also known as Lemony Snicket, and it seemed promising. Turns out is has no plot, the vignettes barely tie together, and NOTHING HAPPENS. I didn't care about any of the characters, the reader is given no reason to invest in them emotionally, and he's got this weird thing about magpies. The prose was pseudo-intellectual: at times it read like free-form poetry and I found myself wondering if it was just beyond my comprehension, but then I remembered that I'm really smart and I read A LOT and realized it's not me, it's that the book is badly written. It SUCKS. Reading this book was like a hate fuck. God DAMN I hated it, but I was going to finish it if it killed me. I'm done, and now I'm burning it. Stupid fucking book.

[clogbottom · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I just read in someone else's review of this that Daniel Handler hangs out in the McSweeney's secret lair and cavorts with Ben Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie) and Colin Meloy (of Death Cab for Pirates).That sounds about right.This book is not dissolute and confusing because it serves its theme. It is dissolute and confusing because Mr. Handler was too busy sorting through his filing cabinet of one-liners and prefab situational jokes to surround them with anything resembling a novelIf he ever decides to put the work in, he'll probably write a good novel.

[nerdfightergirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Adverbs was written by Daniel Handler, better known by his pen name, Lemony Snicket, of A Series of Unfortunate Events. His style is quite different in his works as Handler than as Snicket, which was very stylized to begin with. To appreciate the book, you have to be willing to accept that there are a lot of characters and you will get the names confused. You can go back and try to figure out who's who (I made a chart) but that isn't necessary. I found this book to be surprisingly moving and honest, at least when it comes to the way love can feel. There is a lot of dark humor and some suspension of reality is involved: a ten year old boy and the Snow Queen fall in love over frozen calimari, and San Francisco, as it turns out, was actually built on top of a volcano. Fans of Lemony Snicket will dig this.It seems that many of the other reviewers disliked the short story style, and the lack of connection. However, if you don't sweat the details and simply enjoy the ride, this is a great book.

[teaperson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book lost me at first, and then gathered up steam in the middle, then tapered off a little at the end. It's really interlocking stories - except that the characters are sometimes the same and sometimes not. Their history is sometimes the same and sometimes not. But it came full circle, in a way, at the end and wrapped up much more neatly than I expected.Each chapter is named for an adverb, which features obliquely in the story. The conceit is rather annoying. Many are fantastical, like the mock noir of the Snow Queen in a diner. Others are realistic, like the high school boy pining for his fellow movie theater usher. All meditate, a bit preachily, about the nature of love.

[omphalos02 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Episodic at best, this really reads like a series of in jokes. I felt that it suffered from characters and plot lines that may or may not have been continuous throughout the book. Still, it was amusing in some spots, but overall, I was kind of confused.

[jebbie74 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

From the looks of it, I think I am the only one who didn't fully enjoy this one. Then again, I've never read any Lemony Snickett, and this one was received as an ARC and I was "forced to read it." :)Passed along through BookCrossing

[vegetrendian_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Daniel Handler rocks. I am stalking him across the globe. I had a chance to see him in Wales for the Guardian’s Hay on Wye literary festival both as Lemony Snicket (or more accurately in place of Lemony Snicket) and as Daniel Handler. I also saw him in Seattle for a Mcsweeney’s fundraiser where he had Ben Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie and Postal Service fame) Sarah Vowell (“Assassination Vacation”) and Colin Meloy (the Decemberists) act out a play about his life. He was fantastic on each occasion. He is one of a new breed along with fellow Mcsweeney’s friends Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Safran Foer, to name a few, who can write serious literate novels, that are also fresh, funny, witty, and playful.I haven’t yet read Handler’s earlier two ‘adult novels’ (that makes them sound like porn, but it is really just an annoying tag given to novels written by people who also write kid’s books), but Adverbs is an excellent novel. The prose is playful and fun, there is a lot of wordplay and humour, and colourful phrasing, but there is also a lot of heart. The characters are deftly portrayed and are brought fully to life. The book is a set of short stories each titled with an adverb and are about love in some form. The characters all move in and out of each other’s stories as they criss-cross the US and fall in and out of love. Though not all of the characters who have the same name are the same person. It would take a careful and exacting read to truly sort out who is who and who knows who and who loves or loved who. But each of the stories are well written and engaging. The characters are lively and fun, and also depressing or creepy, and often sad (how could you write a book about love without sadness?). But they are always real, and always compelling. There are a lot of pop culture in jokes strewn through the pages, and the book manages to be funny and serious at the same time. No mean feat these days. This is a great collection of stories that also reads as (and is indeed titled as) a novel. This is a rich, warm, funny, and all round excellent book. My stalking will continue. In fact I will see him again this week (finally in my home town) appearing in place of Lemony Snicket. No doubt he will not disappoint.

[invisiblelizard · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I picked this one up for two simple reasons: (1) I loved the writing in the Lemony Snicket books and I always thought this guy would write good adult fiction, and (2) the cover was drawn by Daniel Clowes. Also, if I were honest with myself, I'd admit that the quote from Dave Eggers on the back had something to do with it, too, and I'd start to realize that I admire that guy a little too much.But I digress...The premise grabbed me, as advertised on the inside jacket. This is a collection of stories, all defined by the adverbial chapter heading, all about love, in one form or another: hetero, homo, platonic, unrequited, dying, dead, demented, or simply ignorant. (These are all adjectives, by the way, mine, not adverbs, not the chapter headings.) They are all told extremely well. The voice that Handler uses throughout is whimsical yet poignant. His unseen narrator is an intelligent guy with a sense of humor and a flair for irony. He can be funny one minute and heart wrenching the next, and he uses his humor to effectively avoid the sand trap of sentimentalism you can usually find in love stories such as these.That his setting is the west coast, mostly San Francisco, where terrorists are about to strike (or recently have struck), and Seattle, where either a volcano has or is about to erupt, is both incidental and atmospheric, lending some intrigue to these stories that lies just outside your peripheral vision. Also, he overlaps characters, or at least character names. This leads to interesting questions. Is Allison from the first story the same Allison in the last? What about Joe? I'm pretty sure Gladys is always the Ice Queen, and Mike always seems to be Mike. This unconventional use of characters and names is jarring at first, but it forces you to focus on each story individually instead of trying too hard to find a link between them, even when numerous and obvious links exist.So how does it fare using my typical criteria? As individual short stories, each one is rich in its own detail though not exactly original or inspired. Still I'll give him high marks for the collection on the whole. And I've already talked about the voice: excellent. And the writing, let me say, is surprisingly good. Why surprisingly? I guess I just wasn't expecting it, perhaps not from a guy who's primarily famous for children's books, but didn't I notice a spark of something brilliant there, too?Let me make no bones about it: this may not be a book for everyone. The stories may be a little slim and, perhaps, littered with cliches, but the writing more than compensates. For some reason, this book inspires me to write again; I don't know if it's the wit or the wisdom inherent in these stories, it doesn't matter, because any time that happens, I'm a happy man.Invisible Lizard's Unusual Oranges