49 pages • 1 hour read
Emily HabeckShark Heart: A Love Story
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Our Town
Our Town is a 1938 play by Thornton Wilder that Lewis selects as the school’s annual theater production during his last year of teaching. Often hailed as one of the most important pieces of American playwriting, Our Town is a metatheatrical story that follows the mundane happenings in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners. Acts II and III focus on George Gibb and Emily Webb, a couple who are tragically separated by Emily’s death sometime between Act II and Act III. As the primary literary reference point for Shark Heart, Our Town is a motif that reinforces the novel’s metatheatrical nature and its interest in Life as Metatheater, foreshadows the inevitable separation of Wren and Lewis, and represents Lewis’s lofty theater ambitions.
Habeck had personal reasons for making Our Town what she calls the “centerpiece” of Shark Heart; at the age of 11, she played a small role in a community production of Our Town and was profoundly impacted by Emily’s story. Describing it as “the perfect puzzle piece in the story,” she has said of the play’s appearances in her novel, “Our Town is seemingly innocuous […] but to my mind, it gets at something far more stirring, making narrative of the unadorned fact that everything, including us, is temporary” (“A Novel Idea 2024: Emily Habeck.” Deschutes Public Library, 2024). Indeed, change—whether mundane or profound—is a driving force in both Our Town and Shark Heart, with both works drawing attention to how life forces people to adapt on a daily basis.
Strawberry Milkshakes
In Part 2, George begins bringing Angela strawberry milkshakes as a sign of his affection for her. Angela only tells George that she likes that flavor of milkshake after learning that it is Julia’s favorite. As such, the milkshakes come to symbolize both George and Angela’s growing bond as well as the wedge that it is driving between Angela and Julia’s preexisting friendship. This double meaning is emblematic of the novel’s larger approach to romantic relationships, which often come at the cost of platonic ones. This dynamic is a key piece of Habeck’s exploration of Transient but Formative Female Relationships.
Tensions between romance and friendship appear in multiple instances throughout the novel. For instance, Wren’s friendship with Tiny Pregnant Woman is ultimately unsustainable because Tiny Pregnant Woman is envious of how supportive Wren’s marriage is. In the case of Angela, George, and Julia, the strawberry milkshakes sit at the crux of this tension, embodying how Angela relies on Julia’s guidance at the same time that she deprioritizes their friendship. In the scene entitled, “Something Brief but Significant,” the milkshakes first appear:
GEORGE. Well, can I bring you a milkshake when I get off work?
ANGELA. That would be nice. Thank you.
GEORGE. Which flavor?
ANGELA. What flavor do you get?
GEORGE. I don’t like milkshakes.
ANGELA. What does Julia like?
GEORGE. Strawberry, I think.
ANGELA. Strawberry’s good. Thank you (258-59).
Though Julia is not in the room for this conversation, she becomes unavoidably associated with the milkshakes, as Angela adopts her flavor preferences. As the milkshakes become an integral part of Angela and George’s budding romance, they therefore remind readers of Julia, who has become increasingly peripheral to Angela.
Pear Stems
In Parts 2 and 3, respectively, Angela and Lewis dream that they are the stem of a pear. This surrealist coincidence lends itself to several interpretations, but at their core, the dreams share some key similarities. In both, Angela and Lewis are weighed down by the pear itself, which drags them involuntarily downward, drowning Lewis and preventing Angela from flying: “I thought I could fly,” Angela tells Marcos, “but every time I tried, I found myself stuck to the pear, which made me way too heavy for flying” (217). Lewis and Angela share many parallels, most notably their mutations, which interrupt and commandeer their lives. In this sense, the pear stem dream is a symbol of how both characters are involuntarily doomed by their own bodies regardless of their aspirations. Like the stem and the pear, the body and the soul are tethered to one another, and like the fruit dictates the fate of the stem, the body dictates the fate of the soul.
Water
That Lewis transforms into a shark indicates water’s significance as a motif. Notably, the ocean into which Wren releases Lewis is the same ocean she visited with Rachel on the trip when their relationship began to disintegrate. This suggests an association between water and loss, but in the novel’s broader context, it would be more accurate to say water is associated with the changefulness the ocean’s waves and currents evoke.
Wren struggles with change and uncertainty for much of her life and thus has an ambivalent relationship toward water. She embraces swimming as a way to remain close to Lewis throughout his transformation and even proposes a life alongside him in the ocean. However, the description of Wren swimming out into the waves with Lewis—and her difficulty doing so—underscores that she is still trying to manage and control change rather than accepting it:
Waves rocked her, and she inhaled seawater, coughing. Everything was wrong. She forgot how she was supposed to breathe. Maybe her equipment wasn’t working? She lost both flippers and fought to find them in the surf. She would try again after he’d adjusted on the shore. She wouldn’t give up easily. It would be fine. It would have to be. This was just the test run (156).
By the time Lewis swims away, all Wren can see of the ocean is its unknowability—its “uncharted blackness.”
Wren’s near drowning in Lake Powell thus marks a key turning point in her character arc during which she reconciles herself to change’s inevitability. By the time she returns to the same beach with her daughter, her attitude toward the ocean and all that it represents is transformed: “The ocean cannot be contained; neither can love; neither can Joy” (404-05). The water motif thus comes to underscore Habeck’s contention that closing oneself off from what is transient or uncertain means cutting oneself off from the richest aspects of experience. To have a “shark heart,” Habeck implies, is to recognize this.
