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.
Themes
Navigating Terminal Illness and Anticipatory Grief
In the fabulist world of Shark Heart, animal mutations function the same way that terminal illnesses do. Incurable and physically destructive, the mutations cut the human lives of Lewis, Angela, and Tiny Pregnant Woman short. During the appointment where Lewis receives his diagnosis, the language the doctor uses evokes the language real-world doctors use to describe conditions like cancer: “You’re in the early stages of a Carcharodon carcharias mutation. […] Chondrichthyes mutations, what we call the class of cartilaginous fish mutations, are usually fast-developing, aggressive” (10). This establishing scene indicates the metaphorical significance of the mutations and makes room for the rest of the novel to explore how Wren and Lewis will navigate the illness and their anticipatory grief.
Over the course of Part 1, Wren goes through several stages of grief as she braces herself to lose Lewis forever. At first, she copes by throwing herself into the athletic pursuit of swimming. She tells herself that “she, like Lewis, like the Tiny Pregnant Woman, would transform into something equipped for the water” (68). In this sense, her grief takes an empathetic form, and she tries her hardest to keep up with Lewis’s changing body. However, as the mutation progresses and Lewis becomes more physically like a shark than a human, this coping mechanism becomes impossible. During Lewis’s violent outburst at the party, he has an out-of-body experience where “he witnesse[s] Wren, his assiduous, loving partner, see him not for what he [is] but for what he ha[s] become” (139). Distanced from his human self, Wren is forced to come to terms with a version of Lewis who is impossible to coexist with.
As the one diagnosed with the terminal illness, Lewis must undergo his own grief process, mourning the inevitable end of his human life and his marriage with Wren. Like Wren, this process occurs across various stages, shifting between obsessive focus on his playwriting work, rage at the loss of his teaching job, excitement about his newfound abilities as a shark, and existential sadness about becoming physically separated from Wren.
By the end of the book, however, both protagonists find closure over losing one another and, in Lewis’s case, losing much of himself. For Wren, this closure comes when she begins to see vestiges of Lewis and Angela in both her daughter, Joy, and in herself. For Lewis, closure comes in the form of his new friendship with Margaret, who supports his lifelong love of Wren. The optimism of these endings suggests that the grieving process is not entirely negative. As Habeck has said, “The paradox that the book grapples with, that I’m still grappling with, is that grief is an indicator of success […] success on a heart level. Grieving means we loved the best we could” (“A Novel Idea 2024: Emily Habeck.” Deschutes Public Library, 2024).
Transient but Formative Female Relationships
Though the heterosexual romantic relationship of Lewis and Wren is central to Shark Heart, it is primarily a novel concerned with social bonds between women. Mothers and daughters, female friends, and romantic partnerships between women appear frequently throughout it and shape its plot. As Habeck has said, “While romantic love is the hook that my marketing team loves to project, the love that was easiest to write, and the love that I am lucky to have known all my life is that for and by my mother” (“A Novel Idea 2024: Emily Habeck”). This sentiment aligns with the formative role that female bonds play in Wren’s life.
As Habeck’s statement suggests, mother-daughter relationships are a throughline of the novel. However, both Wren and Angela are born to mothers who are limited in their parental capacity; Colleen’s alcohol addiction prevents her from being present for and supportive of Angela, and Angela’s mutation puts Wren in a position where she must become the caretaker. Inevitably, these mother-daughter relationships are cut short, and Wren in particular struggles to make sense of the loss of her mother. After Angela’s mutation has completed, Wren stares at the Komodo dragon in its cage and “[takes] a last look at the woman who raised her […] Her mother, the kindest person she would ever know. Her mother, her mother, her mother, her mother, her mother. Her mother, an animal, whose eyes were filled with blood” (315). Ultimately, she responds to the generational trauma associated with mother-daughter relationships by attempting to be as present as possible for her daughter, Joy.
Female friendships are also determinative relationships that nevertheless have the potential to end. Angela’s friendship with Julia is one such transient bond. The friendship develops at a time when Angela desperately needs support from other women, having been isolated by her abusive relationship and uncared for by her mother. At the beginning of Part 3, Angela, deeply lonely, imagines
her dream self, whom she deeply, truly, always wanted to be:
the girl with friends
the girl who was invited and included
the girl who went to parties and had plans
the girl who was never alone (196).
When Julia responds to that need, her mother, Theresa. also enters Angela’s life, and these women form a support system in the earliest stages of Angela’s motherhood. Though Wren is too young to remember them after the relationships end, their support is essential to her childhood experience and reverberates through her life.
To a lesser extent, Habeck explores the impact that Wren’s first serious romance, a relationship with her former college instructor, Rachel, had on her. This too is a formative relationship between women that comes to an end. Though Wren’s orientation is never fully articulated or focused on as a central element of the story, her capacity for romance with another woman contributes to the sense that women are consistently the most influential people in her life (with the exception of Lewis). Though all of these formative relationships are transient, Wren derives meaning from each one.
Life as Metatheater
During an early scene in the book, the narrator explains Lewis’s idea that life can function as a form of theater:
Lewis often told his students that living itself could be an art form. So it made sense that his life, as their teacher, would be a demonstration of this principle. If this was Act One, Lewis still had control. He could still direct his own story (12).
In this metatheatrical scheme, Lewis casts himself as director of the play, a role with ultimate creative control, even though the mutation has taken control of his life. Lewis’s conviction in life as metatheater is therefore about cultivating a sense of control when life feels entirely uncontrollable.
The most metatheatrically dense portion of Shark Heart is Part 3, where Lewis continues his emotionally human life within the body of a shark. A plethora of fourth-wall breaks ease readers into this absurdist turn. For example, a note at the beginning informs readers, “Please find in the following pages a story of what it means to be part human, part animal. (That is, if meaning can be found in being, which will also be explored in some detail.)” (319). Part 3 is self-aware, announcing its own subject matter and thematic content to the reader before it even happens. This structure is in part an allusion to Our Town, in which the Stage Manager mediates between the drama and audience and expounds upon the play’s philosophical themes. The play serves as the backbone of Shark Heart’s metatheatrical principles. Lewis’s selection of it as his final school production affirms his desire to live life as if he were a character in Grover’s Corners.
Though his transformation is wrought with traumatic loss, it also enables Lewis to fulfill his desire for a metatheatrical life. In the human world, his dramatic idealism leads him down the path to an unfulfilling acting career in New York. In the ocean, however, Lewis can create whatever theater he wants. His “town […] of stories” with Margaret is proof of this newfound ability (375). Lewis calls the idea of the town “a crisp lightbulb moment, the kind of perfect and complete idea Lewis knew came only a few times in a lifetime” (375). Such complete contentment with this new creative pursuit indicates that Lewis is living his life as a shark in the metatheatrical ways he always strived for as a human.
