Rhoda is selfish and unfiltered in a way that reminds readers of ourselves at their worst, so naturally we love her.” Handler also cites Raymond Chandler as an influence in this regard: “When I teach writing I often teach the opening paragraph of ‘The Long Goodbye,’ which ends, ‘He looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other.’ People think of Philip Marlowe as tough,” he said, “but he’s surprisingly snarky. The book is a version of the diary of high-schooler Flannery Culp. “My first novel, ‘The Basic Eight,’ has a smart, mean narrator,” he said, “and I stole as much as I could from Humbert Humbert, as well as the ‘Rhoda’ stories of Ellen Gilchrist. The Basic Eight is the debut novel by author Daniel Handler, published in 1998. Reviewing John Brandon’s “Citrus County” on the cover this week, Handler celebrates the appeal of smart, mean protagonists. Tyrants, perverts, tragic crushes, gossip, cruel jokes, and the hallucinatory effects of absinthe Flannery and the seven other friends in the Basic Eight have suffered through it all. It’s not surprising that that book is full of happiness and sex, two things you won’t find in the work of Lemony Snicket. He wrote it, he said via e-mail, “in stolen afternoons over a long period of time, often when I was supposed to be chronicling the lives of miserable orphans. But over the past 11 years, Handler has also written three adult novels under his own name - most recently “Adverbs,” in 2006.
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