Treasure Island!!!

I can’t talk about Treasure Island!!! without also mentioning the book that lead me to it, Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay. In one of my favorite essays in the book, entitled “Not Here to Make Friends”, Gay discusses both the issue of what it means to be considered likable as a woman and the perplexing situation these days in which people are automatically critical of their entertainment media as soon as they encounter characters they somehow deem unlikeable, particularly female characters. I will own up to having done this myself in the past, but thanks to Roxane Gay the scales have since fallen from my eyes in this regard.

From Bad Feminist: “That the question of likability even exists in literary conversations is odd. It implies that we are engaging in a courtship. When characters are unlikable, they don’t meet our mutable, varying standards. Certainly we can find kinship in fiction, but literary merit shouldn’t be dictated by whether we want to be friends or lovers with those about whom we read.

I want characters to do the things I am afraid to do for fear of making myself more unlikable than I may already be. I want characters to be the most honest of all things—human.”

Levine’s Treasure Island!!! is narrated by a woman in her mid-twenties, recently graduated from college, and now floating from one unfulfilling job to another. Already unrepentantly self-obsessed, she become preoccupied with Treasure Island, the 19th century adventure novel written by Robert Louis Stevenson, and decides to henceforth live her life in accordance with what she perceives to be the story’s “Core Values”: BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, and HORN-BLOWING. Make no mistake, this woman is completely self-involved. With the idea of seeking adventure she instead embarks on an escalating series of self-created misadventures that impact both herself and those close to her. She even does one thing that I found absolutely horrific, but I thoroughly enjoyed this madcap book. It’s as much a story about the narrator’s hilarious obsession and ludicrous behavior as it is about her friends’ and family’s efforts to cope with her behaviour and relate to each other. And, sure enough, plenty of reviews of this book cite the narrator’s bad behaviour and unlikability as reasons they disliked the book, as though that has something to do with the quality of the writing. But I would direct all of those people to go read “Not Here to Make Friends” and then think carefully about their criticism.

Also from Bad Feminist: “Perhaps, then, unlikable characters, the ones who are the most human, are also the ones who are the most alive. Perhaps this intimacy makes us uncomfortable because we don’t dare to be so alive.”