Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill

[This is a reprint of a previously posted review; it has been posted here for posterity's sake]

I just finished reading Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill. The unqualified review is that it's a real page-turner of a book and I enjoyed it. I'll definitely be looking for Hill's next book.

The qualified review, now with less squee (and lots more spoilers):

On the other hand, I can't say that my enjoyment of the book was unqualified or without issue. Joe Hill is Stephen King's son and I think L'il Joe reads a lot like his Daddy. And I mean this as both a virtue and a fault.

As I said above, Joe writes a heck of a page turner. I have a lot more trouble immersing myself in books than I used to and with HSB, I found myself grabbing for every few moments of time I could to get through just a couple more pages, just a little further. Stephen King calls this the gimme, and Joe really has it in spades, especially considering how much I truly disliked his main character.

The other aspect of that of that similarity, however, is similar faults, mainly in the race and gender issues. Now. Don't get me wrong; I love King. I count him among my favorite authors. But he consistently writes from the viewpoint of white, male characters that have Issues with PoCs and women and are vocal about it. It's hard to parse out how much of that is personal and how much is consistent characterization for the people and places King (and, by extension, Hill) writes about…but it is too consistent throughout King's writing to be entirely dismissed and it's surfacing in Hill's work creates a bigger question, if not a worrisome suspicion. (and OH BOY, I do not need another author failing me right now)

I'm also bugged by the archetype and characterization of women in both authors' works. I feel like the women King writes are often (not always, but often) props, secondary to the great quests of the men and largely existing as the romantic foil or a motivational object. I feel much the same about Georgia/Marybeth and Florida/Anna in HSB. When you cut down to brass tacks and disentangle the visible story-line, it really is their story: Anna, who was first victimized by her stepfather and then by Jude, passed back and forth between them until her inevitable death and Marybeth, whose greatest sin was to get involved with Jude in the first place and who very nearly gives her life for that error in judgment.

And…I think that's part of my problem. Though I feel that the story is really theirs, both women are presented as secondary characters and, more importantly, victims. There's a fine line between victim and survivor and I don't feel like Hill (or King) entirely gets that (though King possibly gets points for Odetta Walker. Possibly).

Part of the reason I disliked Jude so deeply is his intense selfishness, the fact that he, himself, is a victimizer, even down to the removal of the girls' names. To him, through much of it, they are Georgia and Florida, anonymous, available cunt. And the fact that he sees them by their actual names by the end is clearly meant to be seen as part of Jude's redemption cycle, an implication that Jude now sees the girls—women—for themselves, but I think it's muddier for Hill himself. Great pains are taken to show how interchangeable the women are, leading to their blending into a Jude's Girl amalgam. Worse, their end intention isn't even to save Marybeth/Georgia; it's to save Jude, a man who has abused them both for his own personal pleasure. And honestly, it's pretty debatable about whether Jude deserves it.

(Side note: The wikipedia synopsis for the novel doesn't even refer to any of the women by name; Anna is referenced as Craddock's stepdaughter and Marybeth is referenced as Jude's girlfriend.)

At the same time, I feel like there's an unfulfilled potentiality in the story, as presented. Marybeth and Anna are presented as mirrors of each other; mirrors that eventually blend into a singular entity. There's a parallel set up between Jude and Anna (and to a lesser extent, Marybeth), as well, as the victims of parental abuse and some reference to the need to go back and face those demons, to prove oneself over them once and for all...but in Jude's case, there's really no catharsis or closure between him and his father. Certainly not to the degree that Anna gets to face down her abuser. Which would be fine if Anna were the focus of the story, but (though I think she should be), she's very much not. Jude's father is virtually no less a prop than Anna or Marybeth; nearly literally, as his father is largely comatose and immobile throughout, other than in flashback. There's no meaningful interaction between Jude and his father and it seems like the father is mostly there to give Craddock a meat suit to jump into when ectoplasm doesn't suffice.

Concurrent to this, if the main thrust of the story is The Redemption of Jude, it would seem to me (and would've felt more satisfying) if that redemption had more to do with Jude's issues and Jude's past and less a co-option of Anna's. Moreover, it's not really Jude who triumphs over Craddock, it's the conjoined Marybeth-Anna, making his survival/redemption come about through no real effort of his own and, for me, at least, making his purported redemption less emotionally satisfying.

Further still, Anna's catharsis really only comes just prior to her murder at the hands of her abuser(s) and after her death. Marybeth's "catharsis" only comes at Jude's hands (when he assaults the man that molested her as a pre-teen) and her end result is only to save her life (from events she shouldn't have been involved in, anyway) and Jude's.

Now. It's arguable that Marybeth acting to save herself (and Jude) is a cathartic event, even, potentially a feminist event—the woman who saves herself rather than waiting around to be saved—but the book doesn't treat it as such (the book is, after all, about Jude) and no particular weight is given to Marybeth's contribution other than to win her prince through marriage, the 'reward' that Jude has withheld from so many other Marybeths before her.

In all cases, redemption isn't something that has been earned. I'll be the first to admit that my sense of redemption is fairly biblical in notion, but as personal preferences go, there it is. The idea that redemption—for Anna, for Jude and for Marybeth—is something that, to some extent, just happens isn't a pleasing one. For Jude and Marybeth, their primary motivation throughout the novel is to save their own skin. There's a thin scrim of altruism in that neither of them wants to see the other die, but Jude's repentance, in particular, comes at the end of a very big stick.

This is where I want to look at the further, virtually unspoken, parallel between Craddock and Jude as abusers, especially in the way they get their victims to be complicit allies (Anna's sister, Jessica and Marybeth herself) that doesn't really get explored. Craddock is a child abuser who uses hypnotism to control his victims and mask his crimes. He (and Jessica, his victim-ally) murder Anna when the crime can no longer be hidden. And, though the parentage of Jessica's daughter is never called out, it's possible that Craddock moved on to incest. And for this, he earns two deaths, physical and spiritual.

On the other hand, Jude has used any number of women over the years—largely young, often damaged, often previously abused. And by his own admission, Jude treats them badly, justifying it by saying that that's what they expect and want from him and his rock god persona. He doesn't even call them by their own names, instead referring to them by state of origin. He discards them as easily as he picks them up, the minute they expect some modicum of respect or emotional parity or just get too heavy to handle, as in the case of the depressive Anna. Though Jude could not, entirely, have known he was doing it, he sent Anna to her death. Certainly, if he'd given a crap about her past her cunt, he could have seen about getting her some help before he packed her up on a Greyhound and sent her back to what he knew was, at best, not a good scene.

In reading the first few chapters, before the main action had even begun, I was struck by how repugnantly selfish Jude was. It's not just his relationships with women, though those are the most prominent and egregious examples. And I understand that Jude is, himself, a victim of abuse. It's possible that he grew up in an atmosphere of emotional starvation to a point that it's impossible—or near impossible—for him to form meaningful emotional linkages (though the happy marriage ending would seem to belie that theory). But regardless of his past victimhood, the fact remains that Jude is a toxic person. He uses without regard to what he gives back or the cost to the giver.

As I said before, throughout the course of the story, Jude gradually comes to see Anna—and by extension, Marybeth—as 'real' people but his primary motivation remains to save his own ass. Though he has some arguable moral culpability for Anna's death at the hands of Craddock and Jessica, he is not directly responsible. His targeting by Craddock and Jessica is based on a misguided notion on their part that Jude is responsible for Anna turning on them, rather than the long-awaited rising of her own strength. So there's a sense that Jude is an innocent or wounded party in this. But it is arguable that Jude is paying a moral or karmic debt in being targeted this way. IF he hadn't neglected Anna, IF he hadn't sent her back to her abusers…none of what followed would have happened. If Anna—and, by extension, Marybeth—weren't the last in a long line of selfish abuses on Jude's part…none of that would have happened.

Now, one can argue 'ifs' for the rest of forever, but I think it is relatively clear that Jude is, to some extent, reaping what he sowed as much as Craddock did (though, if you ask me, Craddock got off FAR too cheaply)…but, unlike Craddock, Jude doesn't really pay any lasting or significant price for his abuses. Quite the contrary. Though he suffers through some fair inconvenience, it's neither lasting nor particularly permanent. The damage to his hand is significant and lifelong, but it also pushes him out of the creative and mental rut he's existed in for the past unknown period of years. He wins Marybeth, the woman who nearly died to save his life and is rewarded with a happy, sustaining relationship.

…and certainly, life isn't fair. It's not unrealistic or impossible that someone like Jude could earn rewards that he hadn't really earned. But for me, the ending was too easy—a cheat—and Jude's shakabuku (from Grosse Pointe Blank: A swift spiritual kick to the head which alters your life forever.) not completely justified.

Which, really, is one significant difference between L'il Joe and his pa; King's books are filled with the random, uncaring cruelty of life—the innocent and guilty alike getting swept up in events they can't prevent or even alter. For me, that's the basis of true horror: inescapability. Hill, on the other hand, seems to have a bit of Pollyanna in him. I think it's in his prose, though it's hard for me to put my finger precisely on the how; a way of constructing metaphor, the choice of language, the choice of where to put the camera's eye and what it sees…but I think it's most evident in this easy ending, a happily ever after that goes to those who haven't totally earned it. And, as a result, I'm less satisfied with it than I'd like to be. The rush of the story's flow wipes out in muddy shallows without enough scour to keep it clean. And so even my like is tainted by ambivalence and the knots of the story's problems that I can't untangle in my head….or even in the course of this essay.

I guess, in that sense, I am a little haunted by this story. But maybe not in the way that Hill intends.