My Daniel Handler problem

As promised, here's something I wrote several months back. As always, I feel no shame in spoiling the end of all the books discussed.

Sometimes it almost feels like this Daniel Handler fellow is living in my head.

Well, OK, he’s a writer and I’m a writer (clearly far less accomplished than he but still) and he’s a well-red lover of books and I’m a well read lover of books (clearly far less well read than he but still) and so it’s logical that my brain has more of an affinity with Mr. Handler than, say, with the girl at work who just asked me how to spell "threw."

And of course the particular obsession that his writing indicates that he shares with me is an obsession that is probably shared by most writers. More than anyone else, I suspect, it is writers who fret about the lack of simplicity in the world. I can only think of one writer who even seems to have considered the idea that the world is a simple place. That’s Ernest Hemingway and, as much as he valued simplicity in all things, I could easily make an argument that the plainness of his writing was a deliberate attempt to contrast with the complicated world, not an attempt to reflect it. So maybe the actual count of writers who see the world as uncomplicated is an ironically uncomplicated zero.

Few writers, though, confront the complexity as a problem itself worthy of discussion. For most writers, the obsession (frustration might be a better term) is only apparent between the lines – books that are overfull of characters, novels that should have been short stories, sophomore efforts that run to thousands of pages and never get finished. But Handler takes the problem head on, and nowhere more so than in the last of his Lemony Snicket volumes. Having created a whole bizarre world of mysteries and questions and with each successive book presenting far more questions than answers, he had backed himself into a corner: How to resolve all this? But the answer was clear from the very first page, the onion metaphor.

Someone more cynical than I could easily make the argument that this is a cop-out. The novelist chooses their topic and thus it is the novelist’s responsibility to answer all the questions they raise within the narrative. But this is short-sighted and restrictive. If the goal of fiction is to reflect the real world, and for me it certainly is, then fiction must also acknowledge at least at some level that no matter how fleeting a character is they do have their own story, and so does everyone who ever briefly enters their life, and so on and so on. The rebukes to the orphans ("You think your story is the only story in the world?") are in fact direct rebukes to the reader. When you start out with the series, you simply want to know what happens to the orphans – that much is explained. All the other questions we as readers clamor for answers to are questions we have invented and they are tangential to the actual story. Or in other words: If you pick up just one layer of an onion, you can’t expect to know everything there is to know about the whole of the onion.

But as much as it might seem a convenient way out of his predicament, there’s plenty of evidence in his other novels to suggest that the world’s complexity really is one of his obsessions and that, as such, the onion-skin rebuke of Book The Thirteenth might have been planned all along.

Consider the first thing we hear from the narrator of his first novel The Basic Eight: "One may as well begin with ..." she writes. Because, of course, that’s not really where the story starts, but it’s where we may as well start because the whole story of Flannery’s birth (and conception, and her parents’ meeting, etc etc) is just a bit too tedious. Part of the story, certainly, but too tedious. So we may as well begin where we do. We flash back, we get background info, but we don’t have to know how all the Basic Eight became friends or every blow by blow of her previous failed relationship. We don’t have to know it, but it is a part of the story.

Or look at Watch Your Mouth, in which Handler becomes the only person I know of besides myself who admits to being interested in those Library of Congress subject guides. And, of course, interest in order and categorization is itself an awareness of the world’s complexity – organization is how we attempt to minimize the world’s cruel complications. WYM also features one of the most self-aware narrators of any novel (novels?) I’ve ever read, and he too discusses the topic, the millions upon millions of stories the universe can tell. (A side note as it relates to WYM and Handler’s in-my-headedness: While basing a novel on the form of an opera is something that has never occurred to me, it is worth noting that the narrative structure of one of my current novels-in-progress is based on the structure of a piece of musical theatre that I’m particularly fond of.)

And his most recent work, Adverbs, is as blatant a look at the bizarre, complicated world as may be possible in 300 pages. Do these characters inhabit the same world? Are those with similar names in fact the same character? If so, are they all living at the same time? We don’t know. Based on the jacket description Handler wrote the whole point is that he wants us not to know – and to wonder.

But Adverbs is also, I should point out, where Handler and I begin to diverge in our philosophy of how to deal with this issue of the complex world. Maybe because he’s a better writer than I, Handler is more interested (at least in Adverbs but also it seems this is true in The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth) in how to tell stories rather than what stories he’s telling. Adverbs is infuriatingly obtuse, sometimes ending at just the moment we start to care about what’s happening in a story. What horrible act was committed? Did they ever get across the bridge? Who flew a plane into what?

It’s not that I’m adverse to the pleasures of language set free. Hell, look at the emails I write or notice how often I’m using dashes and parentheses and otherwise going off on tangents herein – if writing is something you enjoy and believe yourself to be good at then it’s fun to let your typing fingers run free every now and then. But that, to me, is more poetry than prose and I’ve always enjoyed prose more. Poetry exists to tell a simple truth in a beautiful way (which is also the exact point of Adverbs). There’s value in that, but I was also at one point a journalist, so it’s not hard to understand why my heart falls closer to the prose (tell me what happened) camp. It’s not unlike the difference between a Baz Luhrmann movie – all glitz and color and pomp built around a simple premise – and some kind of David Mamet caper – uninteresting to look out, but full of story to unravel in your mind. Neither approach is wrong, I just like story more than I like artifice. Or maybe Handler is just a better writer than I am, and I’m jealous.

But this brings us to the final proof of my argument, which is again an area where I find I have a lot in common with Mr. Snicket’s personal assistant – we find ending all but impossible. Let’s be honest, Handler’s novels (and the SoUE books) are excellent in many ways but the ending of pretty much all of them could be improved. Strangely, it’s not that he doesn’t know how to end a story – his problem is more that he just can’t leave well enough alone once he has ended his story.

This is eminently understandable. In a universe full of people and lives and stories, nothing really has an end. Flannery’s story isn’t really over after the fateful Halloween party, of course it’s not, but the part we really need to know is over. Same goes for Joseph at the funeral on the riverbank. And for Chapter Fourteen.

At some point, the story you’re telling stops. It doesn’t mean it’s the end for the character, and – unfortunately – it’s often harder for the writer to identify this ending point than anyone else. That’s what editors are for.