Shark Heart: A Love Story

Lewis is Wren’s husband, the titular shark in Shark Heart. He and Wren characterize each other through contrast. Where Wren is highly organized, Lewis is highly disorganized. Where Wren is concerned with immediate reality, Lewis daydreams and adheres to a view of Life as Metatheater. Where Wren is emotionally reserved, Lewis is overflowing with emotions that he longs to share. The narrator reports, “Lewis learned he had to step lightly when he showed Wren his heart. Because Lewis was a man of enormous feeling, this was the most challenging part of their relationship” (16-17). In this sense, Lewis’s relationship with Wren does not conform to his ideal notion of romantic love. Their marital conflicts flow from such temperamental disconnects, with Lewis’s flaws serving as the antithesis to Wren’s. However, their differences are also complementary, with Wren’s practicality facilitating Lewis’s artistic growth.

When he becomes a shark, Lewis’s practical and emotional needs shift drastically. His instinct to hunt and kill other animals is irrepressible and initiates self-loathing in his gentle human spirit. He tries to accept that his new physical life as a great white—solitary, predatory, and without art—will take precedence over his still very human emotional needs. Deep down, however, his longing for community is still there, and it motivates him to become Margaret’s companion. The imaginary town that he builds with her is a manifestation of all the human hopes he never fulfilled and all the human experiences that he cannot have in the ocean. In a sense, Lewis never fully becomes a shark because he remains committed to his human creativity.

Angela, Wren’s mother, is a secondary character who shifts toward a protagonist role in Part 2, when her story becomes the narrative focus. Angela shares similarities with both Wren and Lewis. Like Wren, she grows up with a mother who cannot effectively parent her and is traumatized by that experience. She searches for outlets to cope with that trauma, but unlike Wren, who turns to hard work and organization, Angela seeks out romantic and sexual validation in the form of Marcos. Though this decision temporarily assuages her insecurities and fulfills some of her emotional needs, it ultimately endangers her when Marcos reveals himself to be physically and emotionally abusive.

Like Lewis, Angela is diagnosed with a mutation that turns her into a predatory animal (in this instance, a Komodo dragon), symbolically challenging her to come to terms with her own mortality. She insists to Wren, “I’m not dying. / I’m changing” (302), at the same time that she expresses uncertainty about how those things are practically different. This moment reveals her vulnerability as both a mother and a human, as she tries to reassure her daughter despite feeling unsure herself. Ultimately, the mutation undermines her ability to be a functional mother, leaving Wren to become her caretaker. Angela does not choose this incapacity, and she worries about the effects on Wren from the moment of her diagnosis: “How do I protect others when I become venomous? [...] Will I be able to care for Wren? And the worst: Will Wren have to care for me?” (296). Her fears about violence and about Wren’s well-being speak to her deep desire to provide Wren with supportive, safe mothering.

While there are violent moments during Lewis’s transformation and life as a great white shark, Habeck portrays the violence of Angela’s mutation much more viscerally. In particular, the scene where she eats a golden retriever marks an escalation in the book’s depiction of graphic violence: “Her face was a mask of blood and fur, and her tongue hung past her chin, dripping bloody saliva onto the khaki dress she used to wear to work” (312). The dog is the first nonhuman victim of a character’s violence in the book, and Wren’s strong conviction that her mother is a “monster” after the incident echoes the horror readers are meant to feel while also establishing the depth of Wren’s trauma. Angela’s final words to Wren in the novel, offered in response to Wren’s accusation, are “I know. I am” (312)—a statement that reveals Angela’s self-loathing over a condition she had no control of.