Emily Habeck has a BFA in Theater from Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts as well as master’s degrees from Vanderbilt Divinity School and Vanderbilt’s Peabody College. Her debut novel Shark Heart was a Book of the Month selection, a New York Times book review editor’s choice, and the #1 Indie Next pick for August 2023. She is from Ardmore, Oklahoma and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
When I learned of an upcoming book about a man who turns into a great white shark, I thought this was another example of our need to tame a dangerous wild animal into something suitable for a child’s tee shirt. Shark Heart, A Love Story, Emily Habeck’s first novel (Simon & Schuster, 2023) is not that at all, but much more: a love story about newlyweds Lewis and Wren, a meditation on our relationship with the animal world, and an exploration of illness and caregiving. Shark Heart explores the characteristics we share with other species and the question of what makes humans unique, while it also considers how health and illness affect our relationships with other people.
The novel is also about how we confront our own mortality.
In Shark Heart, the premise is that there is a gene mutation causing some human beings to transform into animals. Lewis, a teacher who dreamed of being an actor and playwright (“he loved to transform”), is one such human. When he learns, in a Kafkaesque moment, that he will soon mutate into a great white shark, he faces this fantastical diagnosis with both resignation and devastation. These emotions, along with the matter-of-fact way the medical world accepts his transformation, serve to make Habeck’s surreal fictional world believable. Habeck, who is an alumna of Southern Methodist University Meadows School of the Arts and Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Peabody College, uses vividly imagined and well-researched details to make the metaphorical story feel real. For example, when Lewis goes to a party, he has to take time to “slather more ointment on his lower back and feet,” as the texture of his skin changes, and “to refill his Solo cup with tap water to meet the demands of his relentless thirst.”
Wren, Lewis’s wife, struggles to accept the changes in her husband and their lives. Her eager but increasingly frantic efforts to accept and accommodate the changes feel similar to our efforts to continue to love and support our loved ones as they become ill, to hold onto the ways they remain their unique selves. In this way Lewis’s transformation is like the progression of an elusive disease such as Alzheimer’s. Lewis moves through the different levels of the medical complex (OCEAN 1 - OCEAN 4), in the way an Alzheimer’s patient may move from Assisted Living to an acute memory care floor and finally to hospice care.
Lewis’s emotional journey also resonates with Alzheimer’s disease. He worries about what will happen to Wren when he ultimately has to leave her for the ocean; Habeck writes that he “wanted to give her permission, in time, to be happy.” As with dementia, memories are gone, yet emotions remain, as well as the realization that memory is gone: “Wren’s face was gone. Lewis could not remember her face. . . he could remember only the memory of the memory. Lewis was devastated.”
As it turns out, Wren has prior experience with illness and caretaking, and the masterful way Habeck hints at this experience early in the novel, and then reveals it in the second part, is one of the great pleasures of reading Shark Heart. Habeck tells the story of Lewis and Wren in nonsequential fragments arranged thematically rather than chronologically. The novel is divided into three parts, and further divided into chapters, some several pages long, some as short as one phrase. Some chapters are written as scenes in a play, and some of the dialogue reads like poetry. Habeck uses the poetic style to touch deeper themes, as the best narrative medicine writing does, for example when Wren expresses these ideas:
Maybe life has no ceiling, no floors, no walls,
and we’re free-falling from the moment we’re born,
lying to each other,
agreeing to make invented ideas important,
to numb ourselves from the secret . . .
Maybe what happens between birth and death isn’t as precious as we think.
Habeck also conveys the more mundane aspects of life in fresh ways. When she writes that, “Lewis missed time-shaping structures, like the weekend, holidays, business hours, and mealtimes. He missed toggling between creative projects,” we know exactly how Lewis feels.
Lewis retains human thoughts and feelings throughout the book. By doing this, Habeck asks how much of our self remains as our bodies are transformed by disease, another way of asking the questions: What is the human self? What elements are essential to its existence? One possible answer is love. The book’s generous spirit is exemplified in the character’s kind treatment of each other, their acceptance of the changes in one another, and their ability to hold onto their love even as their loved ones are transformed. When Lewis buys four kites on his way home from work one day soon after he learns his diagnosis (“one for each of our hands”), Habeck writes: “Wren and Lewis stood at the end of the driveway, watching the kites float between their hands and the blue, so free for something bound to the earth by a string.” Later Lewis realizes that “he was an aimless kite in search of a string to ground him to the world, but instead, he’d found Wren, a great, strong wind who supported his exploration of the sky.”
Wren and Lewis never stop loving each other. Shark Heart has, in the words one character uses to describe another, “a bountiful, brilliant imagination.” I’ve never read anything quite like it.—Priscilla Mainardi
Priscilla Mainardi, a registered nurse, attended the University of Pennsylvania and earned her MFA degree in creative writing from Rutgers University. Her work appears in numerous journals, including Pulse - Voices from the Heart of Medicine, the Examined Life Journal and BioStories. She teaches English Composition at Rutgers in Newark, New Jersey and has served on the editorial board of Intima since 2015.