Daniel Handler, also known as the children’s author Lemony Snicket, would presumably write his adult fiction as a side project. But “Adverbs” (Ecco, 288 pages, $23.95), his new collection of heavily linked stories, is easier to recommend than many of the more ambitious titles published this month.

Each story here describes a way of loving: immediately, obviously, arguably. These adverbs do not belong to the array of words a person uses to describe his own loves; rather, they are applied by the curatorial author. Indeed, most of the loves described are not quite believable. A young man leaves his girl on the sidewalk, gets into a cab, and falls in love with the driver. Showing a streak of the curmudgeonly boy genius, Mr. Handler seems to taunt the reader: Have you loved so randomly?

Like many youngish comedic writers, Mr. Handler is attracted to moments of excruciating pain – sudden breakups, terminal illnesses, deceased children. These disasters delimit his adolescent world: They drive his post-adolescent characters back into worldviews based on teenage crushes and best-friend solidarity. About a group of sad people in a sad diner, he writes, “The pop songs they heard slayed them every time.” Indeed, the reaching language of pop music provides a medium of gallows bravado. One young woman says about her dying peer: “She was all the world’s money, and I would spend it with her, my sharpest friend who changed the tide, my only comfort from the brutal gamble of the world and the wicked ways of men.”

Tragic love dignifies common humor. When one young woman says of her friend, “She made me want to have a hero,” the first-glance cynicism of that joke molts away to release a wistful insight.

But when Mr. Handler writes that “it’s always dawnest before dark,” he may seem to have made things too easy for himself. His verbal sleightof-hand can seem belligerent. An old lady calls a boy named Mike “dear,” but he corrects her: “‘Mike,’ Mike said. …” leaving the reader to do a half-amused double-take.

At times, Mr. Handler uses a slightly wrong word in order to leapfrog conceptual gradations. In this sentence, he uses “job” in place of “employers”: “Joe’s job thought that enough was enough, among other strategies.” Here the verbal trick, at the cost of a moment’s confusion, tickles the reader’s political conscience, as Mr. Handler suggests how ideological responsibilities come with Joe’s nonprofit’s paycheck. The “among other strategies,” tacked at the end of the sentence, furthers the impression of cookie-cutter concepts, arranged at will by a grammarless world, mimicked by the artful author.

Like much comic fiction, “Adverbs” can sometimes run thin. Mr. Handler interjects his jokes and insights in the old Seinfeldian manner: passing them off as universal common sense, or at least as the shared wisdom of pop adolescence. He does this with a wit sorely missed among other young writers.

***

Out of nowhere comes Robert Hill’s “When All Is Said and Done” (Graywolf, 200 pages, $20), a swift, moving novel of the 1950s from a man who has been writing advertising copy in Portland, Ore., for 20 years. Its form resembles the alternate first-person accounts of a troubled relationship in Julian Barnes’s “Talking It Over”; in its historical shimmer, it recalls Richard Yates’s increasingly beloved “Revolutionary Road.”

The 1950s of suburban commuters provides, in both “Revolutionary Road” and “When All Is Said and Done,” an eloquent backdrop to a story of the final phase of growing up, in which GIs, with dreams, sink in a sea of convenience and booze. But Mr. Hill’s novel is definitely his own.

Mr. Hill’s GI, Dan, has undergone experimental radiation exposure at the Army’s hands, and he cannot compete with his new wife, Myrmy, a trailblazing advertising executive. Mr. Hill begins with a careening monologue from Myrmy, whose stream of consciousness takes on, after one or two pages, the ease of a train ride, blurring through assorted artifacts: Saks, telephone booths, gray lizard handbags, “Oklahoma!”

Dan picks up the next chapter with a strikingly immersive chat with a new neighbor. Mr. Hill’s daring style is full of candied rewards, in the form of show-offy historical tidbits and sharp images. Dan is overpowered by his neighbor’s bad breath: “Oh boy is that smell right there again running up my nose like it’s got a hot date.” The emphatic completeness in describing the smell’s movement up the nose impresses, and remains almost unmarred by the cheesy quip that follows.

Much of the beauty of “When All Is Said and Done” lies in its unusual narrative shape. It begins with these two set pieces, which establish the characters of what appears to be a dramatic novel but are superseded by fragmentary chapters that skip years and then decades, that producing three children and several miscarriages along the way. The book sags briefly in the middle but snaps to attention with Myrmy’s emergency trip to the hospital. The chapter that results is a tearjerker, slow and simple. The rest of the books mops up.

Reading Mr. Hill’s debut novel reminds us how usual most novels are; his is unusual, but not unsettling or obviously weird. Perhaps it is simply the work of an individual who has been minding his own business in Portland.

blytal@nysun.com