The first lie any writing-instruction book will tell aspiring novelists is that adverbs are evil. That's wrong. Obviously. The truth is just that adverbs are tricky: to novice writers, they're enticing and shiny, but their allure is often a flashy bit of nothingness. Many immature writers misuse them (wincingly, fearsomely) in such a way that writing instructors—and some readers—would rather ban the letters l and y than see them misused (so egregiously) ever again.

Daniel Handler—who has written one good debut novel (The Basic Eight); one very bad, very horny novel intended as an incest comedy (Watch Your Mouth); and one bestselling and much-more-entertaining-than-the-movie-would-let-on (-ly) series of children's novels (A Series of Unfortunate Events, under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket)—has written a new book for adults, called Adverbs. It's a collection of very linked short stories, each with an adverbial title, among them: "Arguably," "Wrongly," "Truly," "Frigidly," and, er, "Often." Handler argues (convincingly?) that "[i]t is not the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done."

Adverbs refers to itself as a book about love. Stories in this book will outright tell you, the way that writing-instruction books warn not to, that they are "a love story forgotten by its characters," or that "[i]f you're in San Francisco, as this love story is...," and that love is like saltwater taffy and that "love is... plenty of places to sit but an overall feeling that the room needs a good uptight scrubbing until everything that mentions your mother has been washed away." I do not bring these examples out just so we can all roll our eyes at the author, but neither can I wholeheartedly recommend this book.

Handler, who has written for the Believer and other McSweeney's publications, seems to be a flag bearer of The New Sincerity. His book is earnest. It is a love story; rather, it's quite a few love stories smooshed together, like a Robert Altman ensemble film. It avoids cliché skillfully, and just because it's about love doesn't mean that it's syrupy sweet or relentlessly giddy. If anything, the love in Adverbs is darker than real-life love. Hell, Handler has placed San Francisco, his primary setting, on top of a heretofore-undiscovered and newly triggered volcano; the whole thing is practically a preamble to a disaster movie with an unhappy ending.

Love is part of life; it begs to be written about, but other things simply do not need to be written about—for instance, authors themselves. The author intrusions in Adverbs tend to ruin the fiction's magic: Handler interrupts the climax of the story "Naturally" to inform us that "This book only has young people in it because I am not that old. I don't know what love's like with the bulk of so much time." One of the stories is nonfiction, explaining all the paths that Handler didn't take with the book and the sources of his inspiration—violating this classic writer's-instruction rule: You shouldn't write both your own book and its study guide. It's unseemly. Though some authors (Eggers, Vonnegut) have trespassed into their narratives to splendid effect, here it merely reads as a preemptory laundry list of shortcomings rather than a vivid dialogue between artist and creation.

The writing is at times striking—there's a story where a bunch of people (mailman, vegetable deliveryman, spinster down the street) suddenly decide that they love one random man, and they all wind up in his house, together, admiring the poor befuddled schmuck—and there are times where the writing is so precious as to deserve the modifier "special": "She got herself a glass of water and drank it even though she also had to pee, and this is even another thing like love. We need things and also to get rid of them, and at the same time."

Handler is a rare talent, and Adverbs is an interesting book, but the collision of purposes almost derails the whole endeavor. The fabulist stories and the earnest authorial intrusions don't mesh; the effect is like an abrupt stop in a trapeze act. Consequently, the earnestness begins to seem like another gimmick. The problem with Adverbs is bigger than this book, a problem that gets more acute with each passing year, especially in novels by newer authors: They're trying so hard to convince the reader that they really mean it that they never get around to doing the lying part successfully.