The playful writing style of Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, transcends children's literature and rests on the subject of adult love, its downfalls and its (occasional) pleasures. In Adverbs, which is billed as a novel, each chapter addresses a relationship of one kind or another at a crucial crossroads, using adverbial titles, i.e. "Frigidly" "Wrongly", and "Not Particularly", to describe the nature of the action. The novel progresses in a barely linear fashion, flip-flopping through characters' developments and intertwining previously unrelated characters in surprising ways. This technique creates a lot of fun for the reader; the satisfaction of seeing indirectly how one relationship or character turned out works well to keep the book unpredictable.

This unpredictability does have its dangers, though, and at points Handler stretches the reader's capacity a bit. For one thing, there are several characters with the same name and similar characteristics. While this is rational and realistic, it causes the reader to spend time puzzling over the system that Handler is using, taking away from time that could be spent enjoying the writing alone.

But Handler has an incredible talent for wry humor and absurdist plot, and even when the intertwining of the characters gets a little tangled, the simple excellence of the writing is enough to carry the book successfully. My favorite chapter is titled "Collectively", and involves a man who basically has random people coming to his house to declare how much they like him. Things get a little crowded, when the organic food delivery guy asks to be allowed in to visit:

"Just for a minute," the fellow at 1602 said with a sigh. "I already have three people here."

"I didn't want to insist," said the guy who delivers the organic box. He was holding a box of heavy cardboard, filled with organic fruits and vegetables and other products..."It's just that I think you're totally super and I want to get to know you."

"Get in line," the postman said, and nearly everybody laughed.

"Do you guys love him too?" the delivery guy said, putting the box down on the counter.

"Hell yeah," Muriel said. "I love this fellow like he's my own baby."

"I like his necktie," Mike said.

"We're all on the same page, clearly," the postman said, putting a book back where it belonged.

Contrast this humor with the grief-heavy language in the "Soundly" chapter, in which two friends (one dying of a terrible disease, the other mourning the imminent loss of her friend) stop at a bar they have always meant to go to but never had. Allison and Lila sit and talk and joke, but the sadness and fear hangs over the conversation. Like in most of the chapters, Handler provides a small definition of love, claiming that "[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 strange conversation with a woman named Gladys who is able to make items like a slice of cake 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 requires them to stay put. Allison tries to keep her friend calm when Lila worries about the small window of time that is quickly closing:

"Listen to me," I said, and I felt the fury in my throat. The weight of the world isn't worth it, not even with the love which will die and go away, but each moment with Lila was worth everything, to talk with someone I'd known forever like an old song. Listen to it. Love was all we had left, all of us, as we sat beaten down with the knowledge that there wasn't a boat for the rescue. "They don't know anything," I said, "those guys. They think a leather jacket looks good zippered up all the way...We can do this. That guy's dead for nothing anyway, all the deaths are dead for nothing, but you're not dead at all."

The setup of the book, with its overlapping plots and characters, begs questions of intention. In "Truly", Handler shows his hand a little, reassuring that we

can't follow all the Joes, or all the Davids or Andreas. You can't follow Adam or Allison or Keith, up to Seattle or down to San Francisco or acrossÑthree thousand miles, as the bird fliesÑto New York City, and anyway they don't matter...It is not the diamond or the birds, the people or the potatoes; it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is in the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe...

Handler's previous adult novels proved that he can write for a range of ages with the same veracity and wit, but Adverbs will stand out from his earlier work. The novel is hilarious and tear-inducing at the same time, and reflects a contemporary voice that is original and innovative. Clearly, Handler writes by the claim quoted above, showing that success in a novel is not necessarily where it brings us, but in how it gets us there.