Author Daniel Handler. (Photo Neville Elder/Corbis)
Daniel Handler occupies a rarefied space in contemporary literature. He has published edgy, critically celebrated novels (The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth) while carrying on a lucrative sideline as Lemony Snicket, the mischievous author of A Series of Unfortunate Events, a subversive kids' series that follows the Dahlian exploits of the orphaned Baudelaire children. Like the Harry Potter novels, the Snicket oeuvre has become an industry unto itself, spawning video games, a film starring Jim Carrey, puzzle books, even a magic 8 ball. Handler’s facility in the kid-lit genre seems surprising when you consider that Watch Your Mouth, his second adult novel, was a mock opera rife with incest and murder. Few writers can boast that they get equally fervent props from grade-schoolers and thirtysomething hipsters.
Part of Handler’s crossover appeal lies in the obvious fun he has upending traditional storytelling techniques — particularly his use of cheeky, untrustworthy narrators. The 36-year-old Handler confirms that A Series of Unfortunate Events is over — the 13th and final volume, 13 Shocking Secrets You’ll Wish You Never Knew About Lemony Snicket, will be published in October — but he doesn’t discount the idea of reprising the slippery Mr. Snicket in another book (or series of books).
In the meantime, the San Francisco writer is promoting his latest adult book, Adverbs, an episodic treatise on love. Laid out in chapters with titles like “Arguably,” “Frigidly” and “Wrongly,” the narrative follows a series of characters who experience desire in some of the least romantic places: a movie theatre, a casino, a taxi. Like all of Handler’s fiction, Adverbs is the work of someone in love with the possibilities of language. Handler talked to CBC Arts Online via phone from a tour stop in Vancouver.
A: Certainly, at moments. I did a lot of touring, and if you had asked me at Baltimore airport at 5:30 in the morning if it was becoming wearisome, you would have gotten an answer – the answer would have been, “Get away from me!” In general, though, it wasn’t. A Series of Unfortunate Events was a grand scheme, but it was never a scheme I thought anyone would be interested in. At the onset, I thought the only thing more interesting than one miserable book for children would be 13 miserable books for children. But even the publisher made it quite clear that they weren’t necessarily up for that. Certainly, I never found the actual writing, or meeting the people who read the books, to be tiresome. Some logistical aspects of what you need to do, shoe-leather-wise, in order to keep that going, that could be a little wearying.
Q: In terms of the writing, was it difficult making the transition from a kids' series to Adverbs, an adult book?Courtesy Harper Collins Canada Ltd.
A: The narrators in Adverbs are all unreliable and prone to irrelevant philosophical abstraction, so I’m not sure the [narrative] voices are that different. This novel had a long gestation period because I was always writing a Lemony Snicket book.
The challenge with Adverbs was trying to figure out what I was doing, which is not how I like to go about doing things. Writing all the Snicket books, I got used to a certain structure that was going on, and I got used to getting my structure sorted out and then embarking on writing the books. With Adverbs, I just kept writing, and I had no idea what I was doing. I had an enormous pile of paper and no rhyme nor reason to it. It was only by leaving it alone for a while, and coming back to it and finding this slow-burn structure that I managed to wend my way into it. It was something new for me to write a novel where I didn’t know what was going to happen next.
A: Because one of the books is dirty? Is that what you’re asking?
A: [Laughs] Yeah, I have. The Basic Eight seems to be a nice sort of bridge-way book, because it’s about high school students and it’s narrated by a high school student. That’s been interesting. I’m just getting to a point where I’m meeting some readers who I remember from when they were young. I just did a reading in San Francisco, and I remembered this little girl — because her name was Lulu Rosenthal, and how could you forget that? And her hair was always dyed some outlandish colour. She used to be a little girl, and now she’s leading an indie-pop band. That’s more the weird experiences [I’ve had], watching them grow up — rather than me thinking about which books of mine they’re reading.
A: I thought it was many drafts of the same story, or maybe even a sort of book of essays with fictional examples. You know those self-help books that say, “For example, Bob and Mary had trouble in their marriage,” and it tells their story, and it seems suspect because it falls so neatly into the seven-point plan for self-esteem, or whatever the book is about. So I began to conceive of a book of stories on love, with strange, entirely fictional examples. And so I went and read some of those self-help books, to see if that was the sort of thing I wanted to do. And, well, if you’ve read any of those books, you know that there don’t need to be any more of them. I thought it was a novel. I felt that “linked stories” was sort of a cheating term.
A: Right, and I’d rather be a really clever novelist. [Laughs] I hadn’t thought of it that way. I guess John Cheever had the decency to give all his troubled suburban couples different names.
A: I find wonder in the world, and I find wonder looking at love and looking at the actions that people perform under love, the people we attach ourselves to. That gives me a sense of wonder. So I wouldn’t mind seeing more of that in adult fiction. But again, I don’t sit down and think, ‘Oh, that first draft isn’t good, it’s not naive enough!’ It’s more that I wanted to convey the deep stupidity that comes upon us when we’re in love, despite whatever other intellectual skills we may have attained. Most sensible people go quite mad.
A: I just find it’s hard to make a thematic claim that can stand up to much scrutiny. In an earlier draft of Adverbs, there was an appendix that listed all the statements that began “Love is…,” just because they’re contradictory in every which way. When you’re in love or out of it, at any given moment you can reach a statement that is rendered completely moot 10 minutes later.
A: It’s funny, every time I finish a Snicket book, I think, “I think this one might be too corny.” And then with other ones, I wonder if I’m being too hard of heart. I was just interviewed by someone, and at the start of the interview, she said she found Adverbs to be entirely insincere. It was just funny, because my paranoia before the novel was published was that people would say, “This is just endless sentimental goop.” So clearly my own barometer for sentiment is maladjusted.
Adverbs is published by HarperCollins and is in stores now.
Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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