Adverbs Daniel Handler Fourth Estate, 352pp, £16.99 ISBN 0007181272
Adverbs, the third adult novel by Daniel Handler (otherwise known as bestselling children's author Lemony Snickett), is made up of wildly intersecting and courageously circuitous narrative threads, each designed to prove that the different ways we love are more interesting than the fact that it's something we all do.
First we meet David, who breaks up with Andrea on a street corner and steps into a taxi. He immediately falls in love with his driver, Peter. In the next chapter, a Gawain-obsessed teenager called Joe pines for his co-worker, Lila, while tearing tickets at a showing of Kickass: the movie. Lila's boyfriend is inside, kissing another girl.
As the novel progresses, this web of romantic entanglements enlarges to engulf a cast of married, single, gay, straight, confused boys, girls, women, men, Snow Queens and magpies - many of them sharing the same names. At times it all seems dangerously close to nonsense, and Handler is at his weakest when he falls back on supernatural situations and characters. Nevertheless, Adverbs ultimately proves a mercurial and bewitching novel - a sweetly flawed, triumphant mess about everything and nothing. Handler's writing is artful, perverse, irreverent, truthful and ridiculous - but it is rarely less than brilliant.
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