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 whom they are in love with.
Adverbs is billed as a novel, but is commonly described by critics and journalists as a collection of short stories.[1][2] 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." Handler re-uses several names for major characters from earlier works, primarily Watch Your Mouth, including Joe, Steven, and Allison. However, none of the re-used names appear to be the same characters from Handler's earlier work.
Plot summary
In "Immediately", a man leaves his girlfriend (Andrea) and falls in love with his homophobic cabdriver.[3]
In "Obviously", a teenager (Joe) working at a multiplex takes tickets for Kickass: The Movie while pining for the teenage girl (Lila) working the shift with him.[4] She has a boyfriend (Keith). Joe mentions a friend, Garth, who travels to San Francisco to meet with his girlfriend, Kate. This Kate is Kate Gordon, one of Flannery's friends in The Basic Eight, who is mentioned having a brief relationship with a guy named Garth in that novel.
In "Arguably", a British writer (Helena), who is married to a man (David) whose ex is called "Andrea", needs money.
In "Particularly", Helena works for Andrea, whom she is jealous of.
In "Briefly", a teenager's crush on his sister's boyfriend (Keith) haunts him throughout life.[4]
In "Soundly", a woman (Allison)—who has an ex named "Adam"—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. They reminisce about their friend "Andrea" and an encounter with a boy named "Joe". "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. The guy working at the booth is called 'Tomas'.
In "Frigidly", a pair of detectives comes looking for the Snow Queen (Gladys) in a diner where Andrea is drinking at the counter. A boy (Mike), who had been a student of Helena, is waiting.
"Collectively" is about a man who has a series of random people, including a mail carrier and his son (Mike), 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. The story concludes with the man sharing accepting the affection of his guests by sharing a smoothie with them.
In "Symbolically", an aspiring writer (Tomas) hooks up with a man (Adam) who has come to film a potential catastrophe. The next day, the man returns with his girlfriend (Eddie).
In "Clearly", a young couple (Adam and Eddie) sneaks away into the woods for some risqué outdoor sex. After they have undressed, an apologetic hiker (Tomas) interrupts them with news of an injured friend (Steven). The couple attend to the hiker's needs, leaving their own hanging.
The female character (Eddie) in "Naturally" dates a man who turns out to be a ghost. When she discovers this, she ends their union. Her ex is called 'Joe'.
"Wrongly" features a graduate student (Allison) inexplicably drawn to a colleague (Steven) who's already treated her badly.
In "Truly", Daniel Handler explains the game Adverbs: "Someone is It and leaves the room and everyone else decides on an adverb. It returns and forces people to act out things in the manner of the word, which is another name for the game. People argue violently, or make coffee quickly, and there's always a time when the alcohol takes over and people suggest hornily and we all must watch as It makes two people writhe on the floor, supposedly dancing or eating or driving a car, until finally It guesses the adverb everyone's thinking of. It's a charade, although it's not much like Charades. You play until you get bored." Handler's explanation of Adverbs leads to a discussion of the identity of characters across chapters: "Nobody keeps score, because there's no sense in keeping track of what everyone is doing. You might as well trace birds through a book, or follow a total stranger you spot outside the window of your cab, or follow the cocktails spilling themselves from the pages of vintage cocktail encyclopedias to leave stains through this book, or follow the pop songs that stick in people's heads or follow the people themselves, although you're likely to confuse them, as so many people in this book have the same names. You can't follow all the Joes, or all the Davids and Andreas. You can't follow Adam or Allison or Keith, up to Seattle or down to San Francisco or across—three thousand miles, as the bird flies—to New York City, and anyway they don't matter."
In "Not Particularly", Helena awaits the return of her husband, David. She thinks he's cheating on her, because he's left his passport behind, but she doesn't realize that (at that time) he doesn't need a passport to travel to Canada. Helena meets Joe and gets a letter addressed to Andrea.
In "Often", Allison is married to a comic writer and goes on a cruise for comic writers. She meets Keith.
In "Barely", Sam moves out after her roommate (Andrea) gets involved with Steven. The boy across the street is Mike.
In the last story, "Judgmentally", Joe avoids jury duty and meets Andrea, who is driving a cab.
Reviews
Tasha Robinson, writing for The A.V. Club in 2006, wrote that the book "deepens as it goes along, turning into something richer and more complicated than it seems at first blush. As characters, objects, and symbols, vault across plotlines to repeatedly re-emerge, and successive stories not only become stronger and better realized, but reflect back on previous chapters, the book takes on a keener, smarter edge. It's like watching a film come into focus."[1]
Lucy Ellmann, writing for The Guardian, reviewed the book poorly: "The cute faux awkwardness, the pedantry proposed as mateyness, the tricksy reminders of the narrator's role, combined with ominous stories of young women going into the woods alone or getting into cars with strangers, and the requisite allusions to 9/11, all connive at seeming cool, timely, significant, memorable: teenage stuff."[5]
Lemony Snicket is the pen name of American author Daniel Handler. Handler has published several children's books under the name, most notably A Series of Unfortunate Events, which has sold over 60 million copies and spawned a 2004 film and TV series from 2017 to 2019. Lemony Snicket also serves as both the fictional narrator and a character in A Series of Unfortunate Events, as well as the main character in its prequel, a four-part book series titled All the Wrong Questions.
Daniel Handler is an American author, musician, screenwriter, television writer, and television producer. He is best known for his children's book series A Series of Unfortunate Events and All the Wrong Questions, published under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket. The former was adapted into a Nickelodeon film in 2004 as well as a Netflix series from 2017 to 2019.
Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday is a 1973 novel by the American author Kurt Vonnegut. His seventh novel, it is set predominantly in the fictional town of Midland City, Ohio, and focuses on two characters: Dwayne Hoover, a Midland resident, Pontiac dealer and affluent figure in the city, and Kilgore Trout, a widely published but mostly unknown science fiction author. Breakfast of Champions deals with themes of free will, suicide, and race relations, among others. The novel is full of drawings by the author, substituting descriptive language with depictions requiring no translation.
The God of Small Things is a family drama novel written by Indian writer Arundhati Roy. Roy's debut novel, it is a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love Laws" prevalent in 1960s Kerala, India. The novel explores how small, seemingly insignificant things shape people's behavior and their lives. The novel also explores the lingering effects of casteism in India. It won the Booker Prize in 1997.
A Series of Unfortunate Events is a series of thirteen children's novels written by American author Daniel Handler under the pen name Lemony Snicket. The books follow the turbulent lives of Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire. After their parents' death in a fire, the children are placed in the custody of a murderous relative, Count Olaf, who attempts to steal their inheritance and later, causes numerous disasters with the help of his accomplices as the children attempt to flee. As the plot progresses, the Baudelaires gradually confront further mysteries surrounding their family and deep conspiracies involving a secret society known as the Volunteer Fire Department.
Miss Havisham is a character in the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations (1861). She is a wealthy spinster, once jilted at the altar, who insists on wearing her wedding dress for the rest of her life. She lives in a ruined mansion with her adopted daughter, Estella. Dickens describes her as looking like "the witch of the place". In the novel, she schemes to have the young orphan, Pip, fall in love with Estella, so that Estella can "break his heart."
The Drifters is a novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author James A. Michener, published in 1971 by Random House. The novel follows six young characters from diverse backgrounds and various countries as their paths meet and they travel together through parts of Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Mozambique. The story is told from the perspective of the narrator, George Fairbanks, who is an investment analyst for the fictional company World Mutual Bank in Switzerland. Mr. Fairbanks is connected with nearly every character in some way, and they all seem to open up to him throughout the novel in one way or another.
The Basic Eight is the debut novel by author Daniel Handler, published in 1998. The book is a version of the diary of high-schooler Flannery Culp. It contains a number of sarcastic plot devices that ridicule high school English classes, standardized testing, satanic panic and talk-show analysts. The book is a classic example of an unreliable narrator. Consistent with Handler's farcical treatment of high school English, he includes vocabulary words and study questions at the end of some of Culp's diary entries.
Absolute Beginners is a novel by Colin MacInnes, written and set in 1958 London, England. It was published in 1959. The novel is the second of MacInnes' London Trilogy, coming after City of Spades (1958) and before Mr. Love and Justice (1960). These novels are each self-contained, with no shared characters.
Sweet Valley High is a series of young adult novels attributed to American author Francine Pascal, who presided over a team of ghostwriters to produce the series. The books chronicle the lives of identical twins Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, who live in the fictional Sweet Valley, California, a suburb near Los Angeles. The twins and their friends attend Sweet Valley High.
Gilead is a novel written by Marilynne Robinson published in 2004. It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is Robinson's second novel, following Housekeeping (1980). Gilead is an epistolary novel, as the entire narrative is a single, continuing, albeit episodic, document, written on several occasions in a form combining a journal and a memoir. It comprises the fictional autobiography of the Reverend John Ames, an elderly, white Congregationalist pastor in the small, secluded town of Gilead, Iowa, who knows that he is dying of a heart condition. At the beginning of the book, the date is established as 1956, and Ames explains that he is writing an account of his life for his seven-year-old son, who will have few memories of him. Ames indicates he was born in 1880 and that, at the time of writing, he is seventy-six years old.
Helena Maria Viramontes is an American fiction writer and professor of English. She is known for her two novels, Under the Feet of Jesus and Their Dogs Came With Them, and is considered one of the most significant figures in the early canon of Chicano literature. Viramontes is currently the Goldwin Smith Professor of English at Cornell University.
All the Wrong Questions is a four-part children's book series and prequel to A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. The series explores Snicket's childhood apprenticeship to the secret society V.F.D and expands the fictional universe introduced in the novel The Bad Beginning, the first of thirteen installments in the A Series of Unfortunate Events books.
The Heat of the Day is a novel by Anglo-Irish Elizabeth Bowen, first published in 1948 in the United Kingdom, and in 1949 in the United States of America.
Rachel Holmes Ingalls was an American-born author who had lived in the United Kingdom from 1965 onwards. She won the 1970 Authors' Club First Novel Award for Theft. Her novella Mrs. Caliban was published in 1982, and her book of short stories Times Like These in 2005.
The Words is a 2012 American mystery romantic drama film, written and directed by Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal in their directorial debut. It stars Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana, Olivia Wilde, Jeremy Irons, Ben Barnes, Dennis Quaid, and Nora Arnezeder. Cooper, a childhood friend of Klugman and Sternthal from Philadelphia, was also the executive producer.
A Series of Unfortunate Events is an American black comedy drama streaming television series based on the book series of the same name by Lemony Snicket for Netflix. It stars Neil Patrick Harris, Patrick Warburton, Malina Weissman, Louis Hynes, K. Todd Freeman, and Presley Smith. Dylan Kingwell, Avi Lake, and Lucy Punch join the cast in the second season.
Caroline Kepnes is an American writer, screenwriter, author, and former entertainment reporter. She is best known for her novel series You, consisting of You (2014), Hidden Bodies (2016), You Love Me (2021), and the forthcoming For You and You Only (2023), writing for the 2018–present Lifetime/Netflix television series adaptation of the same name, and the stand-alone novel Providence (2018).
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
