Shooting the Heart [Hardcover]

Paul Cody (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 3, 2004

With his previous novels—So Far Gone, Eyes Like Mine, and The Stolen Child—Paul Cody has established himself as a writer with uncommon gifts. Brian Hall (author of I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company) has said of his new novel: "I can think of no one else who writes with Cody’s combination of savagery and tenderness, or who displays such a translucent style to such reverberant effect." Cody here journeys into the mind of Earl Madden, a former Boston schoolteacher who has been committed to a state mental hospital. Manic depressive and heavily sedated, Earl is haunted by the disturbing question: Did I kill my wife? Could I have done such a thing?

As the novel progresses, Earl recalls with intermittent clarity his unstable childhood, his brief courtship and marriage, and his obsession with serial killers. He broods too about American history and literature, and about his lost parents and brother, but especially about his missing wife. Luminously written and intensely frightening, Shooting the Heart is an unforgettable novel that will grip the reader in suspense until its final revelation.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Paul Cody's dark and disjointed third novel tells the story of a man so obsessed with serial killers that he may have crossed the line and become a killer himself. Earl Madden, a teacher at a private high school, is fixated on a number of gruesome murderers (John Wayne Gacy, the Boston Strangler, among others), to the extent that his interest finally lands him in a mental institution. Once he is there, doctors try to figure out whether or not Earl killed his missing wife, Joan, a fellow teacher. The novel tells Madden's story in vignettes and flashbacks, alternating with the histories of notorious murderers. The narrator's passion for serial killers is never adequately explained; even he doesn't know why he's fascinated by them (halfway through the novel he finally asks himself, "What is it that draws me so to these people?"; unfortunately, there's no clear answer). The scenes in the mental institution sound lifted from One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest ("She could have security here in five minutes, big fat bastards with sticks and radios, and there are shots, injections of one thing and another"), while ambitious attempts at insight into the criminal mind fall flat (about Gacy, Cody writes: "He was God almost. Master of Death, King of Life, Servant to None. And they encamped against it and fought against it. In the Bible. But he was unto him. A Master. None but unto Him. John. So long, John"). Evil comes to seem merely tedious in this numbing portrait of madness and (maybe) murder.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In an understated tour de force, Cody takes the reader into the mind of a mentally ill man who may have murdered his wife. Once a teacher of history and literature at a private high school in Boston who inspired boys with Whitman, Earl Madden--obsessed with serial killers, whose true accounts are threaded throughout the book--is in a mental hospital, being asked about his wife, Joan. Did she leave him--as Earl himself would have done--or did she die at his hands? Earl's first-person account goes back to his childhood, during which he saw his father institutionalized and was the victim of a neighbor woman's erratic anger, on to his hearing voices that demean him and practicing self-mutilation. Cody, a former addict and mental patient, knows whereof he writes, and there are some echoes of his three earlier well-received novels here. But it is the consummate skill that he brings to his experience that makes this account of mental illness, with its lucid prose, as astonishing as it is frightening. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (May 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067003309X
• ISBN-13: 978-0670033096
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,995,044 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful, Brilliant, and Timely, June 10, 2004

By 

Anthony Di Renzo (Ithaca, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shooting the Heart (Hardcover)

"What is hell?" asks Father Zossima in Dostoevski's "The Brothers Karamazov". "It is the inability to love." Paul Cody maps the coldest part of hell, the ninth circle reserved for those who betray intimates and benefactors, in this powerful, brilliant, and timely novel. Earl Madden, the mentally disturbed teacher whose obsession with serial killers may or may not have driven him to murder his wife Joan, is no mere clinical case. He is very much a man of this historical moment, a lost soul mourning his alienation from everything he loves in an America that glorifies and sexualizes violence. In a culture where pornographic snapshots of naked and tortured Iraqi prisoners and the footage of Nat Berger's decapitation permeates the Internet, Earl's struggles to maintain his sanity and decency will be all too familiar to most readers. His final defeat after a harrowing inner battle is both a tragedy and a warning. As Oscar Wilde noted, "Each man destroys the thing he loves. The brave man does it with a sword, the coward with a kiss." Cody tempers his novel's bleak naturalism, however, with moments of haunting lyricism, as if he were Theodore Dreiser scattering haikus throughout "An American Tragedy". Some passages demand to be read aloud. All in all, an unforgettable book from an important contemporary writer. Read it and tremble.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A riveting, hypnotic tale, August 19, 2004

By 

Jessica Keener (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shooting the Heart (Hardcover)

This is a must read for fans of Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King or The Sopranos. Cody's latest novel about thwarted, desperate love is elegant, creepy, beautiful, disturbing, rhapsodic and masterful in its ability to capture the essence of a lost soul. Enter Earl Madden's world, a compressed place where drifters and yearners, sadists and crumpled dreams reside. In prose that is distinctly poetic, you'll find a dissection of the human race in all its darkest glory. The marriage of violence, sex, love and death form an oceanic outpouring that is scary and wondrous down to the last aching words. Cody's creative imagination is fifty yards ahead of the pack.

Jessica Keener, Boston Globe Correspondent
Brookline, MA

2.0 out of 5 stars Tedious and lacking charm, December 27, 2007

By 

B. Copus - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shooting the Heart (Hardcover)

Paul Cody has a fantastic idea for a novel in "Shooting the Heart", he really...really does. Upon quoting "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor to begin this saga, I was immediately thrilled. I envisioned the Misfit in a more modern, lengthy work. Something where a character could really develop their psychosis. That's what we got from "Shooting the Heart"....sort of.

It's in the execution that the idea falls short. The psychosis appears forced from the onset. Whether or not this is based from factual experiences, the wording itself fails to adequately enthrall the reader to a point of believing. This leads to a lack of sympathy for the main character- something that is drastically necessary for this novel to work.

The novel manages to skirt around major questions for some time, as many good novels do. However, the author manages to find a way to leave us on the fringes and call it "closure", so to speak. If the author wanted no beginning and no end, he succeeded. Note: He should read "Rules of Attraction" for an adequate in and out sans beginning/ending.

All in all, even with these nuances, the book could have managed. After all, the realist in me wanted to say, "Ok, this could happen," and accept it. In fact, aside from poor word choices, the story really could have ended up believable. Unfortunately, the words come short elsewhere. It simply leaves the reader stumbling over sentences, sometimes needing to read twice. This breaks the illusion and authors are aware of that. The author must have been looking for a new method, but what comes out is a less-than-par Palahniuk knock-off. The double usage of nouns such as, "She. Joan, she <action>" becomes tedious and hard to plunder through after the first few times. Fragmented sentences can sometimes serve to speed up places, give a passage a feeling of panic, or such- however, the overusage in this book once again breaks the illusion and sends us back into reality where we have to analyze the words, not as someone genuinely a part of the story, but more like a reader of a textbook.

"Shooting the Heart" is a decent book for someone fascinated with serial killers who wants to see information put in a more artistic sense. A teenager who liked the awkwardness of Palahniuk may resort in a book like this. Outside of that, it will most likely fail to charm the reader.