You know how sometimes you read so much of an author that his tone of voice, his quirky eye for quirky things, his attachment to certain moods and turns of phrase and senses of humor become fully acclimated to your own tone of voice, your own quirky eye, your own moody and wordy and humorous attachments, at least in your own head, so that you forget that they came from somewhere and just think, "That's the way things are; this is the way I think about the way things are," and you think, "This is how the world is, to me; this is how I am, in the world," and then you pick up another book by that author and you think, "This is interesting, but, frankly, he's just saying what passes in my own mind, my own everyday mind, and how hard is that—I do it all the time," and it takes you a while to realize that the reason the earth isn't trembling as you read is not that you could have written this book just by being in the world, no, but that the book is written in the very language in which your mind has been taught to think, and you have to realize that before you can realize what new kinds of things it's saying to you this time?

That's how I am with Daniel Handler. I don't love all his books. Of course, I am devoted to the splendid Series of Unfortunate Events. I enjoyed The Basic Eight very much, but it didn't place Handler in my pantheon of Writers Too Brilliant To Be True, alongside the likes of Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Haruki Murakami. And I was actively disappointed by Watch Your Mouth, which just didn't work, somehow. But last night I stayed up late finishing his most recent work, Adverbs, and I realized around 1:37am that all the barely conscious judgments I'd been passing on the book as I read, ranging from the enchanted to the skeptical, were not at all the point. The point is that this writer's writing—its voice, its perhaps irritating delight in words, particularly in how they warp the real into truer shapes, its willful confusion of the funny and the sad, its dead-on sense of the infuriating, its sublimation of its fury into wordplay, because where else is it going to go—this writing rewrote my own mental processes some time ago, and now Daniel Handler and I are in a relationship. Probably a permanent one. I'm living in his waking dream of the world. It's useless for me to say, "This book was really great" or "This book thinks it's too clever by half," because I might as well be giving a book report on the weather.

That said, I could add that this is the first piece of Handler's writing under his own name that demonstrated to me how moving he can be. Never sentimental, of course, because sentiment has to believe on some level that it lives outside of wordplay, and nothing in a Handler novel does. But his chapters on the friendships between women were captivating—I was reminded of a Dorothy Parker story I have to look up to be sure it really exists—and by whatever devices and sleights of hand, the book did leave me with the sense that I'd just read as true an exposition of Love as a young, self-conscious, too clever, wordy person can find.

I'm sending this one out to a few friends -- I'm very curious to know what others think of it.

Bookring order:
1. JennyO
2. fsr44
3. grendel1031
...and then back to me, unless someone else wants to jump in.

Like zugenia, I'm a big fan of Handler's A Series of Unfortunate Events, so when she mentioned she'd enjoyed this book, I knew I had to read it. It came in the mail today, and I chuckled when I read Dave Eggers' quote on the back which said Daniel Handler has "...become something like an American Nabokov." Nabokov? Who knows. Maybe. Handler does love words. I'll reserve judgment on the comparison until I've finished the book, though.

I will say I fell head over heels for the first sentence: "Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner." I'm trying desperately now to figure out how to occupy my kids for the afternoon so they'll leave me in peace to read.

Thanks, zugenia. Expect another journal entry in a couple of days. Then, I'll get the book off to fsr44.

Okay, not Nabokov, but not bad either. I never quite know what to say about Handler. His style is unlike anyone else I read, and I have a serious love/hate relationship with it. I'm trying to figure out why. I think maybe it's this: even though I read quickly, I must, at some level, sub-vocalize as I read, and my favorite writers are those whose sentences are beautiful both in the content and in the phrasing. Sentences must sound beautiful to me when read out loud. Or at least clever. Or something. And though Handler does write sentences like these, he also writes sentences that infuriate me because they seem so awkward. Yet there are things he writes that I find absolutely brilliant and hysterically funny, and as zugenia said, in this case extremely moving. So, it's sort of an up-and-down ride for me. All in all though, this was more up than down. Especially once I'd gotten into the story and started to care about the characters. The last pieces, beginning with often were marvelous.

So, here's one of the bits I liked:

p. 260 - Character description: Appropriately tall. Could dress better. A body you could like if you liked that sort of thing. Using a United States metaphor, if everyone in New York City is staunch and traditionally heterosexual and up and down the West Coast, from Seattle to San Francisco, there is nothing but lesbians and gay men, put Joe in maybe Kentucky.

So, thank you zugenia. I'm very glad I read the book. I'll get it off to fsr44 by the end of the week.

Arrived today. Couldn't wait, so I dived right in. I just love the second story, "Obviously". Zugenia, you're my hero. I read the review of this in the NYT Book Review and immediately put it on my wish list. What a nice juicy read on a juicy hot afternoon!

Hmmmm. Love/hate relationship with Handler and this book? Maybe. There were moments that were just so lovely and true, particularly Soundly in its portrayal of a female friendship. But there were also things about this book that were downright annoying. Can someone please explain to me what the significance is of the recurring "scraping paint off a window" image that runs through several of the stories? Because I don't get it. And I often felt that Handler was far too in love with the sound of his own words. Or, as zugenia mentioned, "too clever by half". Some of the repeated phrases (i.e. "like they do") started to grate on my nerves.
All in all, it was a worthwhile read for chapters like Soundly, but I won't be running out to buy more of Handler's work.
Sending off to grendel1031.

Received today. Now, I have even more motivation to finish Falstaff</i!