Review: 'The Harpy' by Megan Hunter

What do you do when a single phone call beings to unravel your carefully performed life? What do you do when chaos and pain come to the forefront? How do you keep going when your normal has been so disrupted? In The Harpy Lucy finds a way, but it may lead to more unravelling. Thanks to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My apologies for the delay in reviewing.

Pub. Date: 11/3/2020
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

Part revenge tale, part fairytale, The Harpy is an electrifying story of marriage, infidelity and power by the author of the #1 Indie Next Pick, The End We Start From, Megan Hunter

Lucy and Jake live in a house by a field where the sun burns like a ball of fire. Lucy has set her career aside in order to devote her life to the children, to their finely tuned routine, and to the house itself, which comforts her like an old, sly friend. But then a man calls one afternoon with a shattering message: his wife has been having an affair with Lucy’s husband, Jake.

The revelation marks a turning point: Lucy and Jake decide to stay together, but make a special arrangement designed to even the score and save their marriage—she will hurt him three times.

As the couple submit to a delicate game of crime and punishment, Lucy herself begins to change, surrendering to a transformation of both mind and body from which there is no return.

Told in dazzling, musical prose, The Harpy is a dark, staggering fairy tale, at once mythical and otherworldly and fiercely contemporary. It is a novel of love, marriage and its failures, of power, control and revenge, of metamorphosis and renewal.

I'm not so low-key obsessed with women coming apart in literature. There is something fascinating to me about a life falling apart and something new rising in its place. I think this was at the root of my obsession with witches when I was a child and now it has expanded into my academic research as well. In my research I look at how anger and monstrosity go hand in hand in the depiction of female characters in medieval literature, and so whenever I encounter something similar in modern fiction I dive in. I recently had that experience with Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, a novel that blew my mind. In The Harpy, which came out earlier, I found a similar kind of unravelling woman who turns to the mythical and animalistic to regain a sense of self. While much shorter than Nightbitch, The Harpy does manage to pack a similar punch. The expectations of motherhood and a married life, the self-doubt these introduce, the violence of intimacy, they all come to the fore as Lucy questions herself and her life. While I am happily single and childless at the moment, I nonetheless find these explorations fascinating because I can't help but wonder about them as well. Motherhood and marriage don't have to be constricting and confining things, but they can turn into that, either by outside force or from internal fears. I'm so glad female authors are exploring this and taking it as far as they are, because these books form a kind of release. While not everyone will need that release, some of us do.

Lucy and Jake are your normal, everyday couple. Happily married, two kids, a rented house in a well-to-do neighbourhood. She has halted her career and her dreams of becoming a writer to raise her kids and finds a certain kind of fulfillment in the life she has. Until a single voicemail shatters that life. How can she forgive Jake, when he has hurt her so much? The answer is, hurt him in return. The Harpy tells the tale of Lucy's three opportunities to hurt him, interspersed with ruminations on her obsession with the classical figure of the harpy. These little sections on the harpy were fascinating, as Hunter brings together ideas about revenge, hurt, anger, and the performance of motherhood and womanhood, all while telling the story of Lucy's thinking. I go into the structure of the book a little more below, but I very much enjoyed it.  Lucy is not necessarily a likeable character in the traditional way. She makes some strong choices, she spirals, she is messy, but for that I adore her. Jake and the kids are, in a way, utterly secondary to the novel and to the reader because we only really see how they impact Lucy or how she feels about them. If this were different, if they were more fully realised for the reader, The Harpy would be a different book. Its focus on Lucy is a strong point and I wouldn't have exchanged that for more on the other characters.

I haven't read Megan Hunter's first book, The End We Start From, although I have been wanting to for quite some time. In a way, perhaps, The Harpy was a great introduction to her writing style. Hunter's writing in this novel is incredibly poetic and lyrical and I found myself really gripped almost from the beginning. Structure-wise, Hunter has also set up The Harpy in a really interesting way. If we think of the novel as a play with three acts, something I am very fond of doing despite the medium-bending (sue me!), then The Harpy begins with a glimpse of the end of the second act, before everything goes properly dramatic. From that glimpse, we move back to the first act and get to know Lucy, and through her Jake and their two sons. Having had this little glimpse, there is a kind of 'how will we get there? what is coming next?' suspense which keeps the tension consistent. The third act reads like a full-on unravelling which was so frantic by design that I was almost breathless reading it. I think The Harpy will be fascinating on my second read because the propulsiveness of finding out what will happen has lessened enough for me to pick up on more of the details and beautiful language Hunter sprinkles throughout her narrative.

I give this novel...

4 Universes!

The Harpy is a fascinating novella of a woman unravelling and finding something of herself in the process. For those who picked up Nightbitch, this is absolutely your kind of read!