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“…and
I was awake, this Earl person who was
I, a big,
nervous trembly guy, and nowhere near
the country
of sleep. The quiet place on the
other side, where
I had to get to if there was any hope
for me. Awake
like an exposed nerve.”
 Shooting
the Heart
—a novel of madness and even
murder… maybe…
Author
Paul
Cody
in a conversation
on
Off
the Page
Originally
broadcast
Tuesday,
8/24
Listen to the program now
in RealAudio©
format
(requires
free
RealAudio© player)
Earl Madden has
been a successful American. He’s
overcome a troubled childhood
darkened among other things by a
mentally-ill father, he’s
received his graduate degrees and
been hired to teach American
literature and history at a private
high school in Boston, where he’s
married one of his fellow teachers
who was drawn to his loneliness and
eccentricity.
But by the time we meet him in the
opening pages of Shooting
the Heart, it’s all
come unraveled. He’s lost his
job, he’s a resident of a
psychiatric ward being kept under
control with large doses of
anti-psychotic drugs, his wife is
missing, and he thinks… or
perhaps he only thinks he thinks…
imagines he thinks… he may have
killed her.
Ithaca novelist Paul Cody’s
latest tale of a darkness at the
heart of the American Dream dives
ever-deeper into depths he’s
explored in his earlier novels; he’ll
be Tom Milligan’s guest on the
next edition of “Off the Page,”
WSKG’s forum for writers from
the region. The program will be
broadcast live at 1 pm with listener
calls and email Tuesday Aug. 24,
repeating at 7 pm that evening.
Paul Cody is a master at creating
bleak, sad protagonists—people
of intelligence and promise who have
somehow gone wrong—and then
laying them open to show us how and
why. Earl Madden is the latest in
this line.
Except that the how and the why
remain hidden from him—and
hidden largely from us as well, like
the how and why of that lonely but
normal-seeming neighbor suddenly
revealed as a mass murderer. We hear
certain details from his life and we
feel a resonance, a tantalizing hint,
something that gestures toward the
why of what he’s done, yet even
the hints taken all together don’t
add up to an explanation we can get
our minds around.
For Earl the hints include his deeply
depressed and finally
institutionalized father, a neighbor
who threatens the child Earl with the
ovens of the Holocaust and then
sexually abuses him, an agonizing
sleeplessness, dark impulses toward
sexual predation and fears of
violence toward his wife, and a way
of thinking that seems bizarrely
disjointed, even allowing for the
fact that the Earl who tells us this
tale is heavily medicated. There is
also the preoccupation with American
serial killers and mass murderers—Ted
Bundy, John Wayne Gacey and Richard
Speck among others—that’s
become recurring theme in Cody’s
protagonists.
Certain intellectual themes, too—Biblical
allusions and references to Walt
Whitman and Governor Winthrop’s
sermon aboard the Mayflower which
first articulated the idea of the New
World as a place chosen by God for
His City on the Hill—gesture in
the direction of an answer to Earl,
and toward  something
broken at the very depths of the
milieu in which we live.
Paul Cody as always provides us the
familiar conventions of a novel—major
and minor characters, a narrative
arc, flashbacks and back-stories and
the chapter divisions we expect—but
this time the conventions do not
comfort.
The narrative arc is interrupted and
fragmented, the flashbacks seem
sometimes to consist of real events
and sometimes of Earl’s fevered
imaginings, and it’s not often
clear which is which. The
back-stories are filled with baffling
details and odd references that
resonate with an odd ambiguity much
later.
And like real life, this novel
frustrates our impulse to have it all
explained, to know what
happened to Earl, or Speck, or Gacey,
or any of us, refuses to provide the
kind of comprehensible resolution we
seek for the ends of our stories—and
yet gives us an ending we cannot
forget.
Shooting
the Heart is like riding
a raft through the rapids of a dark
and troubled canyon, in which the
real and the imagined interweave
almost at whim, an almost-familiar
landscape which leaves us only
momentarily certain of where we are.
Not, perhaps, bedtime reading…
but a beautifully-written, haunting
evocation of a life of doubt and
horror, as it is so often lived.
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