On the back cover of the children’s book, “The Bad Beginning,” author Daniel Handler, writing under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, warns his young readers that the book may be upsetting to them.
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“A librarian, bookseller, or acquaintance should be able to suggest books more appropriate for your fragile temperament,” Snicket writes. “But to the rarest of readers we say, ‘Proceed, but cautiously.'”The same could be said about Handler’s newest book, his latest aimed at adults. “We Are Pirates” is not for the faint of heart, as evidenced by the flurry of outraged reader reviews on Goodreads (“I think Daniel Handler should stick to writing children’s books,” one reader sniped. “This book is a very dark and depressing read,” wrote another.).
Dark, indeed. Depressing? Yes. And yet also fresh, much like his children’s books. Snicket would say to his critics, “please read something else.”
“We Are Pirates” covers a few days in the lives of 14-year-old Gwen Needle and her father, Phil Needle. The Needles live in San Francisco. Phil is a radio executive desperate to produce a show about the American outlaw spirit. Meanwhile, Gwen becomes an outlaw, a pirate specifically, stealing a boat with a ragtag crew and rampaging through San Francisco Bay.
While this may sound like the premise of one of Handler’s children’s books, it is aimed squarely at middle-class, middle-aged readers yearning for adventure and an escape from mortgages and all the rest. Childhood, Handler seems to be arguing, is when we are our wild selves, untamed, uncivilized, even sociopathic. As we age, we grow soft and dull. We lose sight of what we care about. We dream about a return to our earlier days, when we were truly alive.
This might seem reasonable — many of us think fondly back to our youth, a time of endless possibilities and no 401(k)s — but Handler takes this view to the extreme. His children really are wild. They are murderous. They steal. They lie. They are unrepentant and violent. They escape unpunished. This is what those Goodreads readers found so upsetting (it has to be said a good many reader reviewers also loved the book).
Contrast Gwen’s rampage to Phil’s parallel storyline — his problem-filled trip to a radio executive conference in a rundown hotel, in which he cheats on his wife and prepares to pitch a gaggle of executives his radio show about a blues legend. Here’s Phil, as he surveys the view from his hotel room.
Here they were. In the sitting part, two couches sat, and the curtains were open at the big window. Outside it was dark, with lights here and there tilted at warehouses. Phil Needle had been right the first time: it was a sh— view, particularly with his large, disappointed face reflected in the middle of it.
And here is teen-aged Gwen, upon spotting a yacht in the bay, in a section that begins, “Who does not see rich people on a boat and want to destroy them?”
Those in yachts are powerful, but their disputants also have a power granted in oppositional culture. They have contempt, utter and irrevocable, rage produced even in the gentlest. It must, this thing, lead to brutality. Gwen was ravenous to prove these ideas true.
Rarely do writers portray children in such terms without also making them into villains in storylines about school shootings, bullies and such. Here, Gwen and her crew are the true heroes of the book. It is hard to think of another novel in which this also is true. Even in “Lord of the Flies,” which also features murderous children, the heroes, Ralph and Piggy, are good and gentle-hearted.
So what is Handler saying, exactly? Is he celebrating sociopathic teens? Or is he really addressing the moan of the middle-aged reader, who wonders, like Phil Needle surveying his reflection in his hotel room window, whether this is all there is? Whether the best days have floated by, and all that is left is narrowed possibilities and a slow decline? Perhaps Gwen is a fantasy of the anarchy of youth, of the freedom of those years, when anything — even unrepentant murder — was possible.
And this is what separates this book from Handler’s children’s books. Not because it could give them the idea that stealing or murder is OK, but because it hints at the truth about getting older. It never, “We Are Pirates” suggests, gets better than it is now, kids. If that makes you uncomfortable, a librarian might be able to suggest something more soothing.
Trine Tsouderos is a frequent Printers Row Journal contributor.
“We Are Pirates”
By Daniel Handler, Bloomsbury, 273 pages, $26