The miracle of adverbs

I was going to write about Adverbs by Daniel Handler along with Jonah Lehrer's book in the previous post, but then I decided it needed its own entry. So here you are.

One look at the jacket of this book and you have an idea of what you're in for. Cover art by Daniel Clowes, blurbs by Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon, and a meta-blurb by the author on the inside jacket about how authors often write their own dust jacket summaries. Adverbs is subtitled "a novel." Each chapter deals with a set of characters, sometimes with the same names as characters elsewhere in the book and sometimes not. It's clear that some things in the book happen before others (that is, the chapters aren't in chronological order), and there are several repeated themes and places (volcanoes, a San Francisco bar, diamonds, birds, obscure cocktails).

I was at lunch one day reading it, and thought, okay, I need to stop and make a chart with all these people and places and times, and figure out what's going on here. And then in the very next chapter, I read this, in which Handler implies that the same name doesn't always mean the same person:

"...so many people in this book have the same names. You can't follow all the Joes, or all the Davids or Andreas....it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets down despite every catastrophe...." (p. 194)

I can't decide if this is an admission that there's not a logical grounding in time and (fictional) reality - or if Handler's just letting his readers off the hook, while secretly encouraging the more ambitious among them to track those images. Either way, I decided to stop worrying about it and just read, the way one of my college Spanish instructors encouraged us to read in a foreign language - just take in the picture the writer is painting, and don't worry about every little word. As a former English major, that's a little difficult for me to do, but not impossible. Especially when there are so many other books to read, and I'm already a couple books past this one.

Despite this quality, which might be frustrating, I did like this book very much. It has clear relatives in David Foster Wallace's stories and Mark Danielewski's books House of Leaves and Only Revolutions - all of which I love. There are very moving parts, especially the chapter entitled "Soundly."