Heartbreaker by Claudia Dey
Paperback, read July 2019
Upon finishing Heartbreaker by Claudia Dey, and I had a lot of feelings about it. I’ve been trying to go around and check out what other people have thought, and it’s honestly hilarious how mixed the reviews are! Largely, it seems either loved or hated, and it comes down to Dey’s style: a frantic, circular, carefully chaotic style that propels a narrative of trauma, poverty, isolation, and perseverance. Major complaints are that it’s hard to follow, it jumps around, and the dialogue is too unreal. These are all true, but they are also all exactly what I love in a book, so – at the level of storytelling, I loved Heartbreaker. For instance, this slice of wisdom from a dog:
“We are what we have lost, I countered. Here was a way of thinking we could tear apart together. Thinking that reminded us we were alive, and what an inconsistent experience that was proving to be. We are what we have lost, I offered again.”
I loved the vagueness of the Territory, of teenage blood being the Territory’s main export, of the nicknames, of everything life is forced to become in extreme isolation and at the mercy of a world that has largely forgotten them. But I also feel extremely sensitive to the fact that there are, right now, in Canada in 2019, extremely remote communities that are facing extreme poverty and isolation and, in the case of First Nations reserves and communities, have been largely forgotten by a government that forced them there in the first place. Still, one reviewer writes: “Readers are perhaps used to encountering an intentional community as outlandish as the one Dey describes, but in the form of a cult.” Is it so outlandish to imagine a community where milk costs $10 per carton, though? Have you visited Nunavut?
Dey’s bio states that she’s worked as a cook in lumber camps across Northern Ontario, and it feels to me that the conditions of Heartbreaker’s Territory are possibly drawn from–and likely exaggerated–her experience in those camps. Heartbreaker portrays a community that is only a moderately exaggerated version of life for many people in Canada (mostly Indigenous communities), but I don’t feel that’s acknowledged, either within the story or in the media surrounding it, and instead it’s further portrayed as outlandish with the Territory’s backstory: a cult drives as far North as they can to start a civilization. A choice, a lifestyle. A consequence of their own actions.
I was especially sensitive to the narratives of suicide in the book. Isolation and poverty lead to suicide, there’s no question about that. But it’s worked into the story as something shameful, something the community doesn’t talk about, something that just happens sometimes. I couldn’t help but think of Wapekeka First Nation, which just a few years ago had to declare a state of emergency over a wave of youth suicides in their community. Including a sub-plot that revolves around a small group of suicides in an isolated Northern community is not outlandish, is not unrealistic, is not dystopic; portraying suicide as just something that happens here is, in my mind, horrific, and perpetuates the notion that life is sometimes just unlivable, and there’s nothing we can really do about it.
I felt like this book had the potential to be a striking and powerful force of literature. I think maybe it is a striking and powerful force of literature. It is so heavy, it is so dark in the pit of your stomach, it is cutting out a beating heart and asking you to hold it, feel it beat, feel that way life can crush you in its small and large unkindnesses. I fell in love with Dey’s writing. I am a sucker for writing that feels like the inside of my body. But I’m worried about the reception: I’m worried about how people are reading this book and thinking, Wow this is so implausible! Can you imagine this! Wow, those wacky cult leaders! Because it is not implausible, it is damn near happening right now, and they have largely not chosen that life. There is more truth in this novel than people seem to think. It is true that you can’t bury bodies when the ground is frozen. It is true that milk costs $10 a carton.
I want this book to ask us to tear apart together, but I worry that it just invites us to watch something else tear apart, something we believe to be a fiction, only fiction.
