A twist of lemon

BECAUSE the publisher of Daniel Handler’s new book is marketing it as a novel when it bears only the subtlest resemblances to conventional fiction, I’m guessing that “Adverbs” might be causing some confusion for prospective book reviewers. How to summarize the action in a novel that conspicuously lacks a plot? How to analyze characters who proudly broadcast their own insubstantiality, are sometimes interchangeable and disappear randomly from the narrative? What exactly is going on in this book?

In a rare fit of altruism -- book critics not being well-known, as a group, for much of the old Kumbaya -- I am providing a handy guide for those faced with the task of evaluating Handler’s new novel.

Hint No. 1: Explain how it’s not “Lemony Snicket.”

Technically, it’s his third novel written for adults. But don’t even consider neglecting to mention the juggernaut of stupendously successful children’s books that Handler produces under the Snicket pseudonym. “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” that much-celebrated cycle of gothicomic novels about the three plucky Baudelaire orphans, is a true cultural phenomenon: American literature for children that can also be enjoyed by ex-children and whose level of excellence is equal to that of its popularity.

Kids and adults alike love these tales because they present sinister situations in a droll, orderly manner that offers both thrills and comfort. Delightful as they are, however, do not assume that the Snicket books will be remotely helpful in assessing Handler’s novels for grown-ups. They have nothing to do with each other.

Hint No. 2: Offer a few comments about Handler’s “adult” fiction.

Although the Baudelaire children operate in a recognizably moral universe, the characters in Handler’s non-Snicket novels, “The Basic Eight” (1999) and “Watch Your Mouth” (2000), are guided by few, if any, ethical restrictions. “The Basic Eight” is a trippy high school satire in which absinthe overdoses and grisly murders get mixed up with the usual “Lord of the Flies”-meets-”Lolita” high jinks of your average well-heeled San Francisco 12th-graders.

Loosely structured to imitate an opera, “Watch Your Mouth” features a nice Jewish family in suburban Pittsburgh, its little problem with incest, a basement golem, a 12-step program and more grisly murders. Both novels are gimmicky and hectic, and both run out of steam about halfway through their narratives. Again, these books have little in common with Handler’s latest novel, except for their obvious stylistic debts to literary forebears (particularly Nabokov), a fact that will matter when you are ready, finally, to start discussing “Adverbs.”

Hint No. 3: Start discussing “Adverbs.”

In his new book, Handler confronts us with 16 episodes, each headlined by a different adverb -- “Immediately,” “Obviously,” “Arguably” -- and each set in or near a large urban center, usually New York City, San Francisco or Seattle. Within those locales are some archetypal milieus that brim with symbolism: a depressing diner, a spooky forest, a movie theater of broken dreams, a carefree park. The people who inhabit them are also archetypal, to say the least. Handler has taken great care to strip his characters of their specificity or to mock what is particular about them. (“She smoked cigarettes. I worked in a store that sold things.”) There are several Joes, a couple of Andreas, a few Gladyses and Eddies; sometimes the multiples are the same person, other times not. “You can’t follow all the Joes, or all the Davids or Andreas,” Handler informs us in “Truly,” “and anyway they don’t matter.”

What does matter, in Handler’s view, “is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes; it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done.” Handler is championing craft over content; he sees the latter as mostly just the same old story, and he’s daring to sacrifice nearly every novelistic convention to advance his argument.

That doesn’t mean nothing happens, though. The job of an adverb, after all, is to modify some action, of which there is plenty. In “Briefly,” a 14-year-old boy lusts after his older sister’s boyfriend. A postman finds himself inexplicably in love with an average Joe on his mail route in “Collectively.” “Wrongly” spells trouble for Allison, a graduate student, when she hitches a ride with a menacing stranger. In several nonconsecutive episodes, a British novelist named Helena suspects her American husband of infidelity, frets about money and yearns to have a baby.

These stories all share a common theme, which is love in its infinite variety, but unlike the chapters in a conventional novel, they don’t work together in any systematic way. There is no steady character development, no logical sequence of events, no buildup toward any kind of conventional climax.

Instead, Handler connects the episodes by weaving repeating details through them, binding them together in unexpected ways. Among these are popular songs, real and invented; creatively named cocktails, such as the Suffering Bastard; party games, including one called Adverbs; and anxious talk about an imminent urban catastrophe, sometimes imagined as an erupting subterranean volcano, elsewhere as a terrorist-sponsored explosion. Most interesting among these recurring motifs is that of magpies, those “attractive, artful, and aggressive” birds that steal shiny objects and deposit them elsewhere. Handler is revealing himself here as a literary magpie, by poaching stylistic habits from authors he admires (a bit of Borges here, a little Lorrie Moore there) and by plucking physical details from one chapter to be reused in another.

Hint No. 4: Do not attempt to be as clever as Daniel Handler.

Don’t, for example, strive to include a long string of adverbs in your review or consider calling it “A Series of Unfortunate Vignettes.” Trust me on this: You will look bad. The guy is very, very clever. And this time around, there is more to Handler’s ingenuity than his usual cheeky humor. (Although there is plenty of that as well: The adverbs he chooses as chapter titles all have witty connections to their subjects, with “Soundly” describing two young women who urgently need to board a ferry across Puget Sound and “Briefly,” which is indeed beautifully miniature, making a lot of suggestive comments about underwear.)

Though Handler’s previous novels for adults lost their fizz as they progressed, his new book has a cumulative power that is not fully evident until its final pages. Through a blend of artfulness and reader-assisted alchemy, “Adverbs” gradually becomes less like a bizarre partner-switching literary minuet and more like a real novel, with characters who are compelling even when they boast of their own ethereality. Their many observations here about different kinds of love often manage to be quite moving as well as funny, except, of course, when things turn tragic, which they frequently do.

Hint No. 5: Don’t be a sycophant.

It’s so unattractive. Besides, for all its frequent brilliance, “Adverbs” is not an unequivocal success. It makes a valiant case for the indispensability of style, but all the quirky stylistic connections in the world -- those returning magpies, those echoing pop songs -- will not rescue a narrative when it fails to connect emotionally with the reader. In most of these episodes, the emotional lifeline is sturdy -- in “Naturally,” for instance, in which a woman is affectingly haunted by an insecure ghost -- but sometimes, particularly in the sections about Helena the novelist, the reader is left flailing in a sea of arctic sophistication, lonely and adrift.

Nonetheless, this kind of serious playfulness ought to be encouraged. Handler is still in his mid-30s and buzzing with possibility. As he admits in “Wrongly”: “This book only has young people in it because I am not that old. I don’t know what love’s like with the bulk of so much time, or if the most acute heartbreaks really do slip elsewhere or, as I suspect, stay heartbroken, stay terrible, no matter how many catastrophes go by.” Let’s hope that when he finds out, he’ll still be in the mood for storytelling. *