Shark Heart: A Love Story

Permeable boundaries between the real and the imaginary or fantastical are critical to Shark Heart as a work of fabulism, but they also underpin its characterization and themes. This becomes clear on the night of the strawberry moon, which carries great personal significance for Lewis and which he comes to understand as his most perfect memory. This scene has the quality of a transcendental experience, as Lewis feels things that go beyond the realm of normal human understanding. Habeck writes, “In this evanescent moment, the love of his life and the moon became indistinguishable from each other, casting everything Lewis feared about the future in the real but temporary light of goodness. Time suspended” (45). Heavy use of imagery related to light swaths the scene in a dreamy glow, separating Lewis’s internal experience from the nighttime reality of his physical world. Wren experiences some version of this glow too, commenting that the strawberry moon is extraordinarily bright, but the light that Lewis perceives is otherworldly. Indeed, the light is a form of divine clarity, as “a gossamer prescience too delicate to name floated before him, and then it became him” (45). In this transcendent moment, Lewis realizes that his marriage with Wren is the pinnacle of his life experience.

That Lewis, an artistic spirit with a mind full of idealistic dreams, would have such a transcendental experience is not meant to be surprising for readers. Rather, it reaffirms how Habeck has previously characterized him. For instance, the narrator relates that Lewis believes that he met Wren in a literal daydream: “Lewis never shared this with her, knowing Wren would probably perceive it as one of his metaphorical ideas rather than an experience that had actually happened to him” (38). This apparition of his future wife reveals Lewis’s capacity for visionary experience and anticipates his more ecstatic visionary experience under the strawberry moon.

The word “daydream” has an indulgent connotation, implying distraction from the real world. That Lewis chooses to call his premonition by this word therefore indicates his propensity to seek comfort in fantasy, which his belief in Life as Metatheater epitomizes. Nevertheless, Lewis views his affinity for the dream world as revealing realities that go unseen in his mundane world. His daydream of Wren reveals her existence to him and motivates him to pursue her when they meet for real at the cafe. On the night of the strawberry moon, Lewis is overcome with the realization that “[t]his was the place: his life’s true destination, the point of work, fortitude, hope, and valor” (45). In the fabulist world of Shark Heart, scenes laden with the most magic can, paradoxically, also contain the truths that feel most real to its characters.

The revelations that occur for Lewis during his strawberry moon vision become an essential tool for Navigating Terminal Illness and Anticipatory Grief over the loss of Wren. In the next section of Part 1, when he is in physical pain during their journey to the ocean, Lewis has “a revised recollection of the strawberry moon night […]. This version of the memory contain[s] no illness, no impending dissolution of his humanity, no chasm splintering him from his wife, his life at an unstoppable rate” (151). Lewis thus applies his impractical daydreams in a very practical way, using them as a self-soothing technique when the real world is too painful for him to bear. Even later, as a shark in the ocean, when Lewis’s human memory begins to fade, he despairs over the loss of his masterpiece memory: “This is a ridiculous thing to be sad about, Lewis thought, and cried anyway” (357). The loss that occurs here is not just of Wren but of Lewis’s cherished coping mechanism, which soothed him throughout the tumultuous process of his mutation.

Within the strawberry moon scene, Habeck finds Lewis to be both self-indulgent and pragmatic, averse to the real world as much as he is anchored to it and in desperate need of his own fanciful tendencies. The vision operates just as much on a real level as it does on a magical one, proving to be a useful tool for Lewis as he experiences a new, uncomfortable reality. The seeming self-contradiction of a utilitarian daydream demonstrates how terminal illness, which Lewis’s transformation symbolically evokes, can shift paradigms; whereas in times of health, Lewis’s stargazing attitude might be problematically detached, in his illness, it becomes one of his greatest practical strengths.

Wren, by contrast, struggles with Lewis’s diagnosis, in large part due to her firm grounding in the real world. Borders that are porous to Lewis are firm to Wren—despite (or because of) what the novel later reveals about her experience witnessing her mother’s transformation. Nevertheless, there are hints that Wren’s character arc will take her toward a place of greater fluidity. Her interest in swimming suggests a desire not only to connect with Lewis in his changing form but also to access the shifting, layered reality that water represents. Moreover, the character of Tiny Pregnant Woman implies that transformations like Lewis’s are fundamental to human experience. The connection the novel establishes between her pregnancy and the mutations of her unborn children implies that a pregnant body in some sense resembles a mutating or sick one; such changes are integral to humanity’s very survival. Finally, there is Wren’s name, which links her to the animal world and suggests a propensity for flight—i.e., movement between earth and sky and into the transcendent world encapsulated by Lewis’s strawberry moon.