Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine

"Don't tell me you're reading it," she said, as if I were doing something to the book, whereas in fact the book was doing something to me. I'm twenty-five years old and this happened on a Monday when I didn't have to work at the Pet Library and had no plans except to sleep and maybe wash my bras in the sink, and that was a big maybe. Birds chirped, shadows fell on the linoleum, in the distance a weed trimmer whined. When I got to the point where Long John Silver's gang captures Jim Hawkins in the deserted stockade, Lars, my boyfriend, left a message on my voicemail, saying did I want to go out for a burrito.

Here is my life, I thought.

And there is the adventurous life kicking out of the covers of Stevenson's novel.

A great book can change your life. The narrator of Levine's novel has her life thrown into sharp relief by--you guessed it--Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, whose ethos of adventure makes her life look small by comparison. She throws herself headlong into a scheme of self-preservation, based on what she considers to be the four "Core Values" of the novel: BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, and HORN-BLOWING. In the process she makes everyone else's life miserable: her boss, whose money she steals to buy a parrot, the parrot, Richard, whom she begins immediately to resent, her boyfriend Lars, her sister and parents.

The exclamation points in the title make it a perfect stand-in for the narrator's project: her life isn't Treasure Island, as much as she wants it to be, but a manic facsimile, a overeager parody. Treasure Island, in fact, is a kind of red herring. The narrator, we come to understand, is a narcissist who has never been fully aware of the practical or emotional needs of others. She doesn't need Treasure Island to become bold or independent; she has always been these things by virtue of that narcissism. The book instead is an excuse, or perhaps a psychological crutch, to rationalize her own cruelties. Though Treasure Island!!! is a deeply funny book, the humor reveals a troubled woman, warped by a repressed household. That she turns the broken edges of her psyche against her parents is the thrust of the novel--the story, perhaps, that unfolds itself while she is trying to live out a boyhood fantasy.

Richard, the parrot, sits as the symbolic center of the novel, squawking with hunger and need. No sooner does she purchase the parrot than she grows sick of him; while she loves the idea of the parrot, the actual responsibility of taking care of Richard makes her sick. "A hundred years?" she thinks, after learning just how long a parrot lives. "With a liver-spotted hand, I reached out for the birdseed; an empty house, a funeral procession, Richard on a stranger's arm, flapping his wings on my grave." Yet her boyfriend, her sister, her parents, all dote on Richard; they accommodate this symbol of her flightiness--pun intended--in exactly the way that the narrator, with her newly formed yet rigid expectations for human behavior cannot. The tension produced drives the novel's comic energy, but also results in a pair of shockingly violent acts that give it an edge.