Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket) reveals his process

To start, a confession: I have never read much Lemony Snicket, neither the 13-book sequence “A Series of Unfortunate Events” nor the four-volume sequel “All the Wrong Questions.” This is not a question of aesthetics but of pragmatics. When my children were little, their tastes went in other directions: Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, “Twilight.” Although we read “The Bad Beginning” and perhaps part of “The Reptile Room” (I don't remember), they never warmed to the author's gothic sensibility or allusive style.

I fully accept that this represents a parental mistake on my part.

Let me also admit that at first I had some difficulty with “And then?” And then? What else?” by Daniel Handler, the writer behind the Snicket franchise, “aka Lemony Snicket,” is identified on the cover. This has to do with the nature of the writing, which can seem diffuse before becoming in one of the book's lasting charms. The reason? And then? What other thing?” is a sort of grab bag, starting in the middle and ending in the middle, while telling a series of stories that connect and overlap.

That something similar can be said about Lemony Snicket's novels is the idea. Handler is a skilled and nuanced writer, with a developed voice and point of view. He's never fit into the categories, so why would we expect him to start here?

For example, there is the question of form or genre. “And then? And then? What else?” It comes positioned as a memoir, but that's not entirely accurate. Neither is a “craft book,” although there are many notes on crafts. More precisely, it is what I want to call a process book, which guides us through the author's process as a writer and reader. It is also a book that means to tell us how to make a life.

Handler addresses this early on: “What am I doing?” the book begins. It is not a rhetorical question but a reflective one, and it opens a line of free association, opinions and observations, which contradict our expectations. Yes, the author acknowledges, we will have preconceived ideas; How, after all, could we not? Regardless of whether we have read Baudelaire's saga of the orphan children, Handler's reputation, the work he has produced, carries its own cultural weight.

“I'm hunched over, with headphones on,” he explains, describing himself writing on a notepad in a cafe not far from his home in San Francisco, “I look like a lunatic, which is probably not the right word. Although he feels good.”

There it is, from the beginning, a conditionality that could seem like a trick if it were not also faithful to life. It's probably the wrong word but does it feel good? Here we get a glimpse of how Handler works. Throughout “And Then? And then? What else?” It highlights the tension between thinking and feeling, the way we can infer something without fully knowing it. That's a familiar feeling to all children who read “A Series of Unfortunate Events”: what adults say and What they do are very different things.

For Handler, those suspicions didn't go away with childhood. At the beginning of “And then? And then? What else?” he remembers a party he attended where “real estate and traffic were the obligatory topics of conversation,” all the boredom of the adult world. Finally, he met a 6-year-old boy “and asked him what “I was passing by, hoping to have a better conversation.” The boy responded: “Last night I dreamed I was a horse.”

It's an instructive anecdote, Handler insists, because children “generally have a firmer grasp of what's interesting to say.” By way of explanation, he continues: “If you were to sum up enduring literature in a single sentence, you could say something worse than 'I dreamed I was a horse': prophetic dreams and animal transformation appear much more frequently in the old epics than in “Let's say, which neighborhoods have the best schools.” In other words, a perception of the world as magical, inexplicable, full of wonder, fear and wonder. Isn't this the reason why many of us start reading? Isn't that what we look for most when we pick up a book?

In “And then?” And then? What Else?” (the title, appropriately, comes from Baudelaire), Handler repeatedly returns to this notion, whether he is talking about his books or the details of his life. He is frank without being too revealing and always looks for a broader integration, a place where thought and feeling can intersect. When I was a student, I suffered from recurring nightmares, populated by ghostly figures, “naked, bald, painted or powdered white.” The resulting lack of sleep caused seizures, as well as hallucinations in which these characters began to appear in the waking world.

Or maybe, Handler surmises, “hallucinations” isn't the right word. “Nabokov,” he writes, “he said that reality was 'one of the few words that means nothing without quotation marks,' and this was an idea that kept visiting me, bringing me comfort and happiness.”

What he means is that we never know anything, not truly, and that what we consider the real world is simply another construct, built from our desires and preconceptions (that word again), as subjective as the angle of our mind. That's the craft lesson here, and also the life lesson: be curious. Don't accept anything at face value. Why couldn't the figures in his dream exist, an acceptance that finally frees Handler from his influence, even if most of us don't see them?

Of course, believing that requires a creative leap. That willingness, that openness, leads Handler to an especially sharp critique of the pieties of cancel culture, with its distrust of work that some might suggest is “problematic”—a word, she explains, that “describes the entire condition.” human, which is let's say that it does not describe anything.” Given the themes and settings of her fiction, Handler has found herself in the crosshairs of several self-proclaimed cultural guardians on more than one occasion, but although she shares some of those details, that It is not what interests him. Rather, it is the question of human personality, human strangeness, which is, as it has always been, the only source of art.

“The peculiarities of individual works,” he argues, “come from the peculiarities of the individuals who make them. All these peculiarities all of them – are problematic for someone or another person. Fortunately, your own choices about preferences, which dictate what you decide to read, are also problematic.”

If that's the case, “And then? And then? What else?” advice, why not opt ​​for joy? Handler wants us to understand that this is the most important component of storytelling (of reading and writing) and also of life. I keep thinking about the conversation with the 6-year-old boy in that stultifying party and in the pure pleasure of both the narrator and the listener in discovering in the moment their own shared humanity.

“Last night I dreamed I was a horse. You don't say it. Tell me more.” That's all we need to know.

David L. Ulin is a contributing writer for Opinion. He is the former book editor and book reviewer of The Times.