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.
Part 1, Pages 94-186Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Wren and Lewis”
Part 1, Pages 94-117 Summary
During the summer of her junior year, Wren took a theology class and became enamored with its instructor, a doctoral candidate named Rachel. After the class ended, the two women struck up a romantic relationship. Wren adored Rachel but struggled to hide her relationship in the heteronormative environment of her sorority house, and she started to worry when Rachel insisted they go on a poorly planned road trip to California together. On the trip, Rachel confronted Wren about her inability to share information about her personal life and past.
In the present day, Wren begins a reserved friendship with Tiny Pregnant Woman. They bond over their shared struggle with anticipatory grief in the face of incurable mutations. Lewis’s physical condition is increasingly deteriorating, and Wren is disturbed by how much he now resembles a great white shark. The school fires him, citing parental fears over safety, and Lewis has his first violent outburst at home. Wren hides behind their kitchen counter in fear. She begins to fear that Lewis will fail to recognize her soon.
Part 1, Pages 118-144 Summary
Wren and Lewis attend the end-of-year production of Our Town at the school where he used to teach. Lewis is deeply disappointed by the quality of the production, which was taken over by the school’s new hire, Pierce Anthony, an inexperienced television drama enthusiast. Lewis immediately despises Pierce, calling him “The Ignoramus,” and writes him a seething letter about his failure in teaching Our Town.
At home, Lewis is increasingly discontented sleeping in the cramped bathtub, so Wren hires some neighbors to build an outdoor pool for him. Lewis loves the pool and begins living there almost full-time, saddening Wren. When Wren tells Tiny Pregnant Woman about these developments, Tiny Pregnant Woman is envious that Lewis has a partner so willing to support his needs. The two women argue, and the argument ends their friendship.
Lewis’s former colleagues at the school host a “farewell party” for him. At this party, he encounters Pierce Anthony and demands an apology for his disastrous Our Town production. When Pierce refuses, Lewis lashes out, violently slapping him across the neck. Pierce collapses to the floor bleeding, as does the school’s assistant principal when he tries to intervene. Wren brings Lewis home after police officers tranquilize him. He has another violent outburst in the kitchen when he wakes up. Wren calls the doctor, who says it is time for Lewis to be released into the wild.
Part 1, Pages 145-186 Summary
After saying goodbye to his parents, Wren drives Lewis to California, where she will release him into the ocean. She stops at the Grand Canyon on the way, pushing Lewis along the walking paths in his wheelchair. Lewis is physically close to the end of his transformation and begins to hallucinate in the middle of the journey, seeing visions of his time with Wren, excerpts from Our Town, and even Sir Patrick Stewart, who tells him “We have been waiting for you, Lewis Woodard” (153).
Lewis and Wren arrive at the beach, which is the same one that Wren visited with Rachel on their road trip. When she gets Lewis to the surf, she excitedly tells him that they don’t have to separate; she will bring her scuba gear, sell their home, buy a boat, and live alongside Lewis in the ocean forever. Lewis is deeply moved to see Wren dreaming of a romantic future but insists that they cannot be together, that Wren should embrace a new future with somebody else, and that she will one day become an exceptional mother. He swims away. In shock, Wren sits on the beach for hours waiting for him to return, but he does not.
Wren takes many detours on the drive back to Dallas. She has a one-night stand with a trucker named Tyler. She returns to the Grand Canyon and takes a family photo with strangers who sense that she is lonely. She rents a boat on Lake Powell and attempts to die by suicide, jumping into the deep, freezing water. As she drowns, she sees visions of Lewis, her mother, Angela, and George, a friend of her mother’s who Wren met at Angela’s memorial service. The vision of George asks her what she will do next, and Wren finds herself motivated to live. She resurfaces, breathing air again.
Part 1, Pages 94-186 Analysis
Wren’s backstory develops the theme of Transient but Formative Female Relationships but also, more broadly, her relationship to change and uncertainty. Wren’s internalized discomfort regarding her orientation no doubt stems partly from societal expectations, but it also reflects her unease with whatever is fluid and mutable. It is telling that part of what Wren appreciates about Rachel is the apparent window she provides into Wren’s own future, thus easing Wren’s anxiety about how she might evolve: “Wren […] saw Rachel as a form of predictive time travel, a way of imagining how she herself might be in her thirties” (97). The events of the novel reveal this kind of prediction to be a wholly insufficient means of dealing with life’s changes.
It is also significant that Wren traces the beginning of the end of her relationship with Rachel to their trip to the ocean. This symbolically associates the women’s relationship with Wren’s marriage to Lewis, as the same ocean also separates them. More broadly, it builds on the use of water imagery to characterize Wren’s struggles with change. Figuratively, the mere fact that Wren is open to imagining a life for herself in the shifting ocean waves by the time of Lewis’s transformation suggests her character growth.
Water is also key to Wren’s transcendent experience in Lake Powell, linking her figurative rebirth to Lewis’s transformation. The episode also closely mirrors the transcendent experience that Lewis has during the “masterpiece” night of the strawberry moon. Wren, too, experiences a revelation in realms beyond ordinary physical experience, finds internal renewal within her most extreme moment of crisis, and decides to live again. Wren’s transcendent realm, however, takes a slightly different form than Lewis’s; she begins to see visions of Lewis, Angela, and Angela’s friend George, whom she does not know well but whom she senses is significant: “I do not believe in God,” she says, “but I think I believe in you, George” (183), likening this visionary experience to religious belief. Habeck thus crafts a transcendent moment for Wren in the tradition of religious mysticism, as visions of a God-adjacent figure (George) fill her with newfound purpose.
The mystical nature of this visionary experience affirms the important shift in Wren’s disposition, which has generally been hyper-practical and anchored in the physical realities of her everyday world. Indeed, this too played a role in the end of Wren’s relationship with Rachel, a theology scholar. Wren’s attraction to Rachel reveals her fascination with people who operate on a more spiritual level than Wren herself does: “Wren listened like a child hearing a fairy tale. It did not bother Rachel that her field of study was fundamentally unknowable; that was why she chose it” (97). However, it is only in the moment of her drowning that Wren is able to fully access the same love of mystery: “[F]or the first time as one new and unborn once again—She was open to the stars” (185).
The truth that Wren gains through her transcendent near-death is therefore a truth that has been apparent to Lewis for their entire marriage and was apparent to Rachel when she and Wren dated: that the uncertain aspects of life can also be the most beautiful. This is true of the transcendental moment itself, which occurs during a near-death experience. The physical danger of the moment is emphasized by the narrator's observation that Wren emerges from the waters of the lake, “shivering, / panting, / and blue” (185). By ending Part 1 at the moment of Wren’s resurfacing, Shark Heart places equal emphasis on the beauty and peril of the moment. The beauty lies in her present decision to keep living, and the danger lies in the self-destructive decisions of her past self.
In that sense, this final scene of Part 1 has a double-edged tone. The ecstatic tone of her visions contrasts with the deep sadness and fear that motivated her attempt to drown. Wren’s life hangs in the balance between these two emotions, and readers are left with the cliffhanger question of which tone will characterize her life after Lewis. This question will not be answered until the very end of the book, in which Habeck offers glimpses of that life. In the interim pages, however, Wren’s story will remain the throughline, tying the stories of Angela, Lewis, and Margaret C. Finnegan together.
