Anchors aweigh!
Life getting you down? Feeling sucked down into a never-ending quicksand that makes you feel that you’d rather be “someplace ... that isn’t this?” Maybe it’s time to consider what you would really risk for happiness and adventure, and whether you’d pay the cost. That’s the exuberant premise of Daniel Handler’s new novel, “We Are Pirates,” centered on a ragtag group of restless teens, unhappy adults and one addled old man.
Phil Needle is a San Francisco man in an increasingly shaky marriage to a woman who doesn’t seem to like him anymore, father to an angry daughter he’s desperate to understand, and a radio producer struggling for his big breakout series that might unleash his own outlaw spirit. He’s about to pitch a show about unknown bluesman Belly Jefferson, certain this will revolutionize radio — and his own life.
Phil’s daughter Gwen, like most 14-year-olds, wants to be anything and anywhere but who and where she is. Her moral compass is a little skewed, something that isn’t helped by her new friend Amber, a dentist’s daughter who approves and even encourages Gwen’s shoplifting. When Gwen is caught stealing, her punishment is to be her grandfather Errol’s companion at the dreary Jean Bonnet Living Center (where, of course, people are doing anything but).
Errol’s cranky and unhappy and struggling with Alzheimer’s disease, but even so, Gwen can’t help but feel a kindred spirit. Both of them are unmoored in the world, until Gwen begins to read and fixate on pirates, who are not only cool, but renegades full of purpose. Enamored of their philosophy — “One day you have taken enough, and you begin to take it all back” — she decides that being a buccaneer is the only way out of everyday tedium, and she soon finds eager recruits.
Not only are Amber and Errol ready to pull anchor, but Errol’s disgruntled Haitian orderly, Manny, who feels “there is no place to make it here, not the right way,” wants to be welcomed aboard. So too does Cody, the younger brother of the boy Gwen yearns for. Together, this ebullient crew charts its course. They’ll be pirates! They’ll “forge a social order beyond the realm of traditional authority” that is suffocating all of them.
And lucky for them, San Francisco offers up the perfect X-marks-the-spot vistas. There’s an actual show ship, the Corsair, used by a television program called “Pirates!,” which runs in port cities across America. The ship is casually guarded, the keys in plain sight. Even better, Gwen has the perfect destination, a run-down theme park, which may or may not have a hotel and a party going on, with the incredibly perfect name of Treasure Island. While Gwen and “her fellow belligerents” may not hit the high seas, they most certainly will be the scourge of the San Francisco Bay, swearing like sailors, stealing supplies and finally taking command of their lives in the most swashbuckling way possible.
Handler (of Lemony Snicket fame) is known for mixing up humor and disaster, and he soon veers into stormier seas. Suddenly, there’s blood in the water, the kids are reported missing on the TV news, and their parents are terrified. Phil is abruptly called back home before he can pitch his show. Can he find his daughter in time?
Handler’s a master with language, crafting showstopping sentences that are fresh and funny. The air feels “elderly, reluctant to move and cranky at him.” Phil’s body is “stretched out like a limousine across the bad bed.” Handler casually inserts himself into the narrative, giving everything the feel of legend, a story burnished with each retelling, and gleaming with rich moral lessons. Freedom has a price tag. “We steal the happiness of others in order to be happy ourselves,” Handler writes, “and when it is stolen from us we voyage desperately to steal it back. ... You can swim as long and hard as you like, but you will be giving up one life in order to save another.”
The only misstep is that when real danger intrudes — a stunning shock in the narrative — these kids don’t seem particularly bruised or unsettled, but in fact, seem completely untraumatized, and in fact, more than willing to create even more mayhem. The more dreadfully real their journey becomes, the less it seems to affect them, until the powerful last pages.
Handler’s world is the dwelling place of culprits and rascals, of unanchored teenagers and adults. But although the novel is a raucously funny adventure, it’s also a tragic exploration of the restlessness in all of us, of the ways we want to claim our happiness like buried treasure that might change everything. “We Are Pirates” is about how we try to forge our own destinies, and if we’re lucky, become heroes of our own stories.