“Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner,” begins Daniel Handler’s most recent novel, “Adverbs.” The opening line sets an accurate tone for the following 17 chapters, as Handler’s style is not unlike a leisurely stroll through busy city streets, complete with beautiful strangers and dogs with funny eyes.
The chapters, each named by a different adverb describing the story within, seem like separate vignettes but begin to cohere toward the end. Among the cast of oddball characters we meet a man suddenly struck with love for his taxi driver, a chain-smoking novelist coping with jealousy and a young boy searching for a mother figure in all the wrong places.
Handler said this novel is “about love,” and he truly shows us love from every angle: friendship, sexuality, motherhood and everything in between. And according to Handler, there is an “in between” the size of Texas. Handler has done what a good author should: He has wined and dined his characters and knows them intimately – Biblically, even. Thus, their bizarre reflections and reactions to human relationships seem to flow reasonably within the storyline but can puzzle the reader at times.
This may be because Handler is more well known as the author of the “A Series of Unfortunate Events” books, which have garnered a Harry Potter-like following. One might think that stories on mature love are quite a leap from fantastical children’s literature, but Handler’s experience with magical realism and black comedy are perhaps the key to the freshness of “Adverbs.”
Readers are bombarded with wastes of perfectly good paper and binding like “The Notebook” and anything by She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named Danielle Steele. Those novels give unrealistic and oversimplified portrayals of love – undoubtedly the most complex, screwed-up human emotion.
Handler does not attempt to qualify an emotion that cannot be qualified, nor does he beat us over the head with hopeless theorizing and woe-is-me longing that is so tiring in contemporary literature. Instead, he tells stories about confused human beings and occasionally comments passively as though he simply witnessed the scene on the street and spoke under his breath.
At times the reader will wince at the dysfunction of some of the relationships, at others he or she will wonder when the laws of physics were suspended and wonder, “What is going on here?” “Adverbs” is inundated with run-on sentences and loose associations, but there is something charming about Handler’s voyeuristic and colloquial analyses of strange humans whose hearts are in the vise.
Handler also cultivates a distinct narrative voice, and a whiny one at that. He seems to tell his stories like a child who has dropped his cookie on the floor, with a tone of disappointment, self-pity and disbelief at why bad things happen to good people.
For all of his originality and poetic statements on life and love, the collection never quite unifies completely. Handler tells us what love is like and certainly what it is not like, but he never grabs us by the shoulders and plants it on us. We can’t even be sure that he ever set out to answer that question.
Despite his keen awareness of the pitfalls of relationships, Handler seems to urge his readers toward whatever weird kind of love they fall into, asking, “This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street, and why wouldn’t you pick it up if it appeared in a cab?” More than anything, Handler asks his readers, “Why not?” and really gets no good answers.
Maggie Calmes can be reached at [email protected].
