After reading Michael Poore’s Reincarnation Blues, I went looking for more comic novels, but I specifically wanted something written by a woman. An internet search led me to Sara Levine’s 2012 novel, Treasure Island!!!. The pitch of a modern young woman, so taken by the adventurousness of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel, that she decides to model her life after it, sounded fantastic to me. The library had it in stock, and here I am!
It’s a captivating book, and wonderfully written. I found myself put off by the main character almost immediately, and I found the premise positively ludicrous in practice. But in spite of all that, I didn’t want to stop reading. Partly, I was compelled by a desire to see where the novel went so that I could make sense of it, so that I could see what the author was trying to say. Partly, I was compelled to see where the story would go—would it just escalate into insanity or would it try to create a moral from the narrator’s tale? The fact is that I read the book in a single weekend, which is not something I typically do. The book moves quickly, but I truly had a hard time looking away. I can’t think of a higher compliment to the writing and plotting of the tale.
As I have said in various other review/posts, I’m a sucker for a well-written first-person narrative. Give me a fun and interesting unreliable narrator and I am all in. The narrator here (and I can’t give you a name because she doesn’t have one) is a woman of 25 with no career ambitions, no relationship ambitions, no real need for money since her parents and friends allow her to live off them with very little complaining, and no direction in life. After reading Treasure Island, she decides that the reason her life is so unsatisfying is that she has been leading a dull life as a dull person. She goes, I can only infer, from a timid self-involved person to a bold self-involved person. She leaves her job, but not because she has the character to quit and find a better job, but because she makes horrible choices and gets fired. In fact, she’s ready to take the job back as long as she doesn’t have to apologize. She leaves her relationship, but not because she has discovered she needs something better and more fulfilling, but because she makes unilateral decisions for her boyfriend who then dumps her and kicks her out of his apartment.
And the narrator truly is an awful person. She’s unfeeling, uncaring and uninterested in others. As she observes, courtesy is not a Core Value for her (118) and when her mom, after being direct with her, says, “I thought you liked candor,” the narrator replies, “I like my candor. There’s a big fat difference” (130). She is cruel toward her sister at every turn, because of her weight, her appearances, her job. Everyone is valued by her insofar as they can do something for her. She’s pretty much a catalogue of every undesirable trait you would want in a person in your life.
And yet, there is something about her that keeps her from being someone you hate. I say that even though I’m aware that there are many readers who have hated her. So perhaps I should say there is something about her that keeps me and many other from hating her. First, there are the glimpses beneath the surface that show us her sorrow and pain, what she refuses to tell us directly in the self-conscious presentation of her writing, such as when Little Richard, her parrot, imitates our narrator unexpectedly:
At first it seemed like a laugh. Then the laugh sort of fell down the stairs and became a wail. That intractable bird, that bird in whom I could barely wedge a useful phrase, had been studying my misery when I’d thought he was asleep. I threw the cloth over his cage and my hands began to tremble. The sound was terrible: defeated, despairing, almost crazy. Shut up, shut up, but he carried on sobbing, relentless as a wave (116).
And even more importantly, there is a little bit of the narrator in all of us, a piece that we are both ashamed of and feel a little proud of. It’s a stubborn and ugly part, but sometimes it’s the part that saves us. It’s the part that makes everything about us, even when we don’t want it to. It’s the part that cuts our sympathies short to focus on some personal tragedy, lacking in comparison. It’s an embarrassing part, but it’s there. As a man, I have a difficult relationship with that part of me, but I imagine that relationship can be even more fraught for a young woman. The book leans into that complication to find the humor and sympathy and horror of its subject.
I can’t say I know what the book is doing, as much as I like being able to say that I know what books are doing. At first, I thought it was a kind of clever spin on Fight Club, the useless empty feeling that consumerism and life in the suburbs makes us feel, but from the perspective of a young woman. But that is unsatisfying and incomplete. I think this book, in spite of its seemingly small world and limited scope, is grasping at some very large things and trying to present them all concurrently, even through the cacophonous voice of our narrator. Adriane, Lars, Rena, Nancy, the narrator’s mother—they all have lives that Levine successfully gets us to feel are much larger than the narrator’s reduction of them all. That’s no mean feat given the novel’s form. Levine points to all these other narratives existing and drowned out by the narrator, and allows their unspoken narratives to be in dialogue with the only voice we are given. What it all adds up to, however, I don’t know. And I don’t know if Levine knows either, or if she is feeling her way toward truths, letting her sense of aesthetics and character guide her toward what it real. That’s admirable. And she is talented enough to accomplish all that in this short, quick-moving, humorous novel.
