Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine (A Review by Lynne Weiss)

Tonga Books/Europa Editions

176 pages/$15.00

Anyone who loves reading has discovered at some point the book or the character that seems to offer a model for how to live. Some find it in Dostoevsky, others in Austen, or Bronte, or Lawrence, but almost no adult finds it in Robert Louis Stevenson, except the unnamed narrator of Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!! a sweetly sad spoof on the literature-as-self-help/self-improvement genre (How Proust Can Change Your Life or Shakespeare on Management). Such books have their place. If people need or want advice on how to improve their lives or themselves, why not get it from great literature?

Whether or not Proust or Shakespeare can help anyone achieve their goals, Levine takes this phenomenon to the point of absurdity with this first novel narrated by a 25-year-old woman with a college degree, a phobia for driving, a series of low-paying jobs, and no sense of purpose who thinks she has found a guide for living in the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.  Her younger sister, a third-grade teacher, dismisses Treasure Island as an “adventure book,” and explains that the trouble with adventure books is that they are “all action and no feeling” and have the moral complexity of a baseball game. Of course, one could argue that this is also the problem—and the appeal—of many self-help books, but our narrator, bored with her job and her own lack of direction, finds inspiration in the story of a boy who abandons his ordinary life, steals a boat, kills a man, and risks all in search of gold. The narrator’s voice in Treasure Island!!! is credible enough to have convinced a Library Journal reviewer that the book was a rather alarming memoir. Her blurb on the inside page retracts her earlier comments to praise the book now that she understands that is fiction.

The narrator reads and rereads her sister’s long overdue library copy of Stevenson’s Treasure Island. She identifies the book’s Core Values—Boldness/Resolution/Independence/Horn-blowing and attempts to model her life on Stevenson’s narrator, Jim Hawkins.

“When had I ever dreamed a scheme? When had I done a foolish, over-bold act? When had I ever, like Jim Hawkins, broke from my friends, raced for the beach, stolen a boat, killed a man, or eliminated an obstacle that stood in the way of my getting a hunk of gold? I, a person unable to decide what to do with my broken mini-blinds, let alone with the rest of my life, lay on my bed, while in the book’s open air, people chased assholes out of pubs, and trampled blind beggars with their horses. You needn’t have a violent nature to be impressed with animal energy.”

Thus inspired, the narrator steals a thousand dollars from her employer (who runs a pet rental service) to buy a parrot. This leads to the loss of her job, which leads to the loss of her apartment. While the narrator constantly assures herself that she is pursuing the Core Values, instead of bold, resolute, and independent, she becomes increasingly sneaky, helpless, and dependent, first on her boyfriend Lars, who she scorns for his lack of bold independence (not to mention horn-blowing). After Lars kicks her out, she moves in with her parents and becomes dependent on them. Despite the pain and havoc she wreaks on the lives of all around her (nearly destroying her parents’ marriage along the way by digging up revelations about her mother’s ex-lover), her parents, her sister, her best friend Rena, and her boyfriend Lars remain touchingly patient and loyal.

I am grateful not to actually know the narrator (or anyone much like her) but as a reader I couldn’t help but sympathize with her in her search for the treasure of self-knowledge and meaning. The narrator doesn’t get very far in her effort to follow the Core Values of Jim Hawkins—Boldness/Resolution/Independence/Horn-blowing. Sara Levine, on the other hand, the author of this sly novel, heads boldly and resolutely toward narrative riches.

*

Lynne Weiss’s short fiction has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Larcom Review, Sequoia, and Brain, Child. She is seeking representation for A Vaudeville Turn: The Hidden History of a Forgotten Star, a novel about a singer who finds her voice and loses her love in the world of early vaudeville.