Adverbs (novel)
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| Adverbs | |
 First edition cover |
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| Author | Daniel Handler |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Ecco |
| Publication date | 5 June 2006 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 272 pp (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0060724412 (first edition, hardback) |
Adverbs is a 2006 novel by Daniel Handler. It is formatted as a collection of seventeen interconnected narratives from the points of view of different people in various sorts of love. Each of the titles is an adverb suggesting what sort of love the people are dealing with. Some people are "wrongly" in love, others are "briefly" in love, and so on. The book focuses on the ways that people fall in love, instead of focusing on who they are in love with.
[edit] Structure
Adverbs is billed as a novel, but is commonly described by critics and journalists as a collection of short stories. Certainly it breaks some of the traditional conventions of the novel genre. The narrative is driven by half-truths and intentionally misleading statements. The point of view shifts from story to story, characters reappear in unlikely settings, multiple characters have the same name, and Handler himself frequently makes an appearance, not in the role of the narrator, but apparently as the author himself.
While the narratives interlock, they are not sequential; and not all characters who share the same name are in fact the same character - even though they may also share certain similar aspects of personality or physical features. The narrator admits as much: "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."
[edit] Plot summary
In "Obviously", a teenager working at a multiplex takes tickets for Kickass: The Movie while pining for the teenage girl working the shift with him.
In "Soundly", a girl named Allison spends an evening out with her best friend Lila, who's dying of a rare disease, and they both focus on what their friendship means, particularly compared to their relationships with men. "Allison" and "Lila" both crop up again as character names repeatedly throughout the book. Handler is sometimes clear about whether he's speaking about the same people, and sometimes not. As in most of the chapters, Handler here provides one possible definition of love: "[t]his is love, to sit with someone you've known forever in a place you've been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it's time to go. You don't care about yours. Why should it change, the love you feel, no matter how death goes?". After a conversation with a woman named Gladys, who is able to make items appear out of thin air, Lila gets a call to come to the hospital for a transplant, but there is a problem with the ferry; some kind of disaster has occurred which means they cannot cross to the hospital.
In "Clearly", a young couple sneaks away into the woods for some risqué outdoor sex. After they have undressed, an apologetic hiker interrupts them with news of an injured friend. The couple attend to the hiker's needs, leaving their own hanging.
"Wrongly" features a graduate student inexplicably drawn to a colleague who's already treated her badly.
The female character in "Naturally" dates a man who turns out to be a ghost. When she discovers this, she ends their union.
"Collectively" is about a man who has a series of random people coming to his house to declare how much they love him. "Isn't love a sharing?", asks the narrator, trying to explain the postman's (and everyone else's) strange longing for the house owner. "Love makes the world go round, the hit songs collectively tell us, and the world is full of people you don't know and might as well be nice to because they won't leave. Some of the people you won't like, but every day we wait for the postman and he hardly ever brings something good".
In "Immediately", a man falls in love with his homophobic cabdriver.
In "Briefly", a teenager's crush on his sister's boyfriend haunts him throughout life.
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