When Daniel Handler first started going on book tours, he left his true identity at home. Instead he traveled as a “handler” for Lemony Snicket, the hugely popular children’s book author he created for “A Series of Unfortunate Events.”
Seven years and 50 million copies of Lemony Snicket books later, Handler must now go on tour incognito – as himself – to escape the crowds.
Handler has been crisscrossing the U.S. to promote his latest book for adults, “Adverbs,” a novel composed of related short stories about romance set in New York and California.
Each chapter is a story that centers on an adverb that ironically describes what follows. The characters fall in and out of love in a story titled “immediately,” betray one another in “clearly” and get over heartbreaks in “collectively.”
“I had no idea it was a collection of short stories,” said the 36-year- old novelist on a recent trip to New York. “I sort of thought it was a mock self-help book, or an essay about love.
“I had lots of drafts, and then I called one of them ‘obviously’ – since that’s one of the words in the story – and then it hit me how strange a part of language adverbs can be. They can modify verbs or other adjectives.”
Parents love him
It is language-wonk comments like these that have made Handler such a beloved figure to parents. Bad things may happen to Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, but their adventures get children to read – and to care about language. Aside from embedded-word games, the Snicket books feature detours into the difference between, say, anxious and nervous. Their titles often include words like austere and ersatz, which normally appear on SATs.
“I just recently got an OED,” says Handler, “and I am constantly learning that words don’t mean what I think they mean. It’s a wonder that people get along, when they don’t even start on the same footing about words.”
Handler should know, since almost every single piece of dialogue in “Adverbs” comes from something he overheard on the street.
“It would probably be more depressing if I made it up,” he deadpans.
A form of protection
Seven years after the initial publication of “Bad Beginning,” the first Snicket book, it’s still somewhat amazing that a series in which so many ghastly things happen to children remains so popular.
Handler came up with the name Lemony Snicket when he worked at an office. To kill time, he says, “I would call the most obscenely conservative organizations to ask for free stuff.” To protect himself, he came up with the name Lemony Snicket.
“Is that spelled how it sounds?” he recalls one phone operator asking after a long pause.
And so the name became an appendage, which he used for all kinds of epistolary mischief. “They wrote me letters that all said, ‘Dear Lemony,’ and I could tell it really pained them to use the first name.” Handler keeps up this sense of unpredictability. As an adult he picked up the accordion and has since become accomplished enough to play along with Stephin Merritt’s cult rock band, The Magnetic Fields. Merritt has recorded a song to go with each Lemony Snicket book and when the 13th and final installment of the Snicket series is published Oct. 13, a CD of the songs will also be released.
Handler also has published a humor collection with McSweeney’s, called “How to Dress for Every Occasions, By the Pope.”
A self-proclaimed bookworm, he spends a lot of time reading – and when not reading, caring for his son, Otto. His wife, Lisa Brown, is a graphic artist from Hartford, Conn. They met on the campus of Wesleyan University when he had a seizure in a Chaucer class and passed out in her lap.
She clearly shares Handler’s sense of humor. Last year, Brown started a series of baby books with “Baby, Mix Me a Drink” and “Baby, Make Me Breakfast.”
Darkness for a laugh
The idea of having Handler as a bedtime storyteller might seem a bit odd. This is, after all, the man who once said: “The first book I bought with my own money was Edward Gorey’s ‘Blue Aspic.’ I was told that he received copies of ‘The Bad Beginning’ before his death. It’s my fantasy that it was my books that killed him.”
But Handler believes firmly in the power of using darkness to make us laugh.
“One of the things my son mimics is us saying, “What?” Handler says, “We say this to him to reassure him that things are not scary, but funny.”
In person, Handler does not resemble the dour figure one might suspect of the author who killed the Baudelaire children’s parents on the first page of “A Series of Unfortunate Events.”
Dressed in a pink checked shirt and blue jeans, he sports an easy chuckle and a stand-up comic’s sense of timing. He wears his newfound wealth as lightly as a windbreaker.
“I know plenty of writers who are way more talented than me who are still struggling, so I think it’s strange when someone wonders if I resent Lemony Snicket – he’s allowed me to write the kinds of books I do.”
After “Adverbs,” Handler plans to push the envelope even further. He tells a story about a comedian who once planned to start a series called “The Pool Cleaners,” in which two guys would go to clean a pool, and “the audience would spend the whole time waiting for something to happen. Only it didn’t.
“I’d like to steal that idea and write it as a book,” Handler jokes.
If he does, chances are readers will follow him there – so long as he plays his accordion.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
