Summary
Set in the Rust Belt (Great Lakes) region of the United States and narrated in the third person by an unnamed limited-omniscient narrator, The Heart Goes Last opens with a married couple, Charmaine and Stan, sleeping in their tiny used Honda. They keep the windows closed to keep out mosquitoes, gangs, and violent vandals. The air stinks because there aren’t many places the couple can bathe. Stan is often irritable living like this, but Charmaine is determined to believe he’s still a good man.
Stan twists uncomfortably in the front and thinks about how he could go to his brother Conor as a last resort, but they’ve had conflict in the past. Stan considers Conor to be a criminal, meaning that he wasn't negatively affected by the recent financial crash. At the sound of people swarming the car, Stan starts it and drives off. Stan feels like a failure after losing his job and house. The narrator comments that Charmaine used to work in the Ruby Slippers Retirement Homes and Clinics chain, while he was junior quality control at Dimple Robotics. The high point of their relationship was getting married in Georgia. They bought a small house up north and then lost everything quickly. They held onto the house, eating cheap food and selling off furniture. There was no housing market left by the time they were prepared to sell; neighboring properties had been abandoned and looted. They fled in their car before creditors could seize the vehicle. Their car is “the only barrier between them and gang rape,” so they can’t sell it. Stan is desperate enough that he decides he’ll reach out to Conor, who “owes him.”
In the morning, they eat day-old doughnuts from a strip mall. Charmaine suggests jogging, like they used to, but Stan looks at her like she’s crazy. Stan searches for jobs but can’t find any. Charmaine has been working for a few weeks as a server in a bar called PixelDust now, getting a meager income. The bar is frequented by drug dealers and sex workers. The sex workers have offered to let Charmaine have a few of their clients, but Charmaine, though excited by the idea, knows she can’t betray Stan like that, even if the money would be for his benefit. Their sex life has suffered since moving into the car. It is too dangerous to be caught with their pants literally down.
While Charmaine is at work, Stan goes to a boarded-up house where his brother used to live. Conor had been squatting there, but now it’s burnt and abandoned. He meets a man named Herb outside. Herb says he’ll take Stan to Conor for a fee. They drive to a trailer park, where they have to pass by guards with cell phones. Conor welcomes Stan into his trailer, which is far nicer than living in a car. He knows Stan is only there because he lost his job; he gives Stan two hundred dollars he owes him and a prepaid cellphone. As he leaves, the guards, Rikki and Jerome, are kinder to Stan. A sleek black hybrid vehicle pulls up, but no one gets out while Stan is watching.
At work, Charmaine sees a TV ad for the Positron Project in the town of Consilience, which offers employment and shelter. The pitchman wears a suit and speaks with a seriousness that compels Charmaine. Charmaine watches with Sandi and Veronica, sex workers who frequent her bar. Sandi says it’s too good to be true. Charmaine fantasizes about sleeping in a clean house with a king-sized bed. She’ll pitch it to Stan by talking about the promise of having sex in that bed.
Charmaine, Stan, Sandi, and Veronica are on the bus to the Positron Project interviews. When they arrive at Consilience, everything is spruced up like in a movie. There is a reception at the Harmony Hotel with white tablecloths. Charmaine has two baths that night in their room. She is delighted, and Stan knows not to ruin her fun by saying it’s not real. She’s so happy. They have sex and Charmaine says if they commit to the project, they’ll say goodbye to the horrible, stinky car.
The first day of workshops begins with PowerPoint presentations showing happy people in Consilience and the Positron Prison. They stay the second night in a dirty motel outside the walls of Consilience as a reminder of how bad the outside world is. Charmaine is ready to sign up, even though it means losing contact with the outside world. Conor arrives unexpectedly, saying he traced Stan’s phone he gave him. Conor warns him not to trust the project or sign up for it. He offers Stan a job, but Stan declines. Conor leaves in a long black car.
They sign up without reading all the conditions fully; their phones are taken. Stan and Charmaine are divided along with all men and women; they are told they’ll be spending a month apart at a time as part of the project. The Consilience/Positron twin city project is supposed to solve unemployment and crime issues nationwide if it’s successful. Stan’s workshop is led by a man named Ed and a woman in a suit who draws Stan’s attention. Ed cites statistics linking joblessness to crime in the region. He declares that the premise of the Positron Prison project is based on the idea that prison labor jobs could sustain a medium-sized town. But because you can’t expect half a society to be criminals, they plan to divide the participants between homes and the prison, with everyone alternating one month working inside prison, and one month outside in Consilience, a portmanteau of Cons + Resilience. Ed wonders who is profiting from the venture, which obviously has a lot of money behind it. Each person will have an “alternate” who lives in the same house as them half the time, while the other is in prison. Their main transport will be scooters. Ed signs up for his three preferred jobs: Robotics, IT, and scooter repair.
A year passes with Stan repairing scooters and Charmaine working as Chief Medications Administrator. Three months earlier, Stan found a note under the fridge that must have belonged to their alternates: “Darling Max, I can hardly wait till next time. I’m starved for you! I need you so much. XXOO and you know what more —Jasmine.” Stan has been thinking obsessively about Jasmine’s overt sexuality and wishes Charmaine desired him like the woman desires Max. He tries to convince himself she’s ugly.
Unbeknownst to Stan, Charmaine has been carrying out an affair with Max on switchover days. They meet in vacant houses, as Max—an assumed name, like Jasmine for Charmaine—is employed to inspect dwellings. She feels foolish and sloppy for having let Stan find the note under the fridge. Charmaine met Max accidentally on a switchover day when Stan went ahead to the prison while she tidied the house for the alternates. He left her with a dizziness like she was standing on the edge of a cliff. She knows she needs to break it off, but she goes to meet Max again, her legs so wobbly anyone watching would think she was disabled.
Analysis
With the opening chapters of The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood establishes the dystopian setting of the novel. Following a financial crash that has devastated the industrial “Rust Belt” region of the U.S., Stan and Charmaine have lost their jobs and their home has become 'underwater,' where the debt they owe is worth more than the house itself. Like thousands of others, the two have found themselves suddenly dropping in social status, going from middle-class comfort to living out of their cramped car and fearing for their safety. With this nightmarish scenario, Atwood establishes the desperation of the book’s dual protagonists.
The opening chapters also see Atwood introduce several of the novel’s major themes: exploitation, loss of human rights, the prison-industrial complex, and the tension between infidelity and devotion. Because of their desperate living conditions, Charmaine and Stan are prime targets for exploitation. With few options for making money and with the threat of roving gangs and vandals and rapists a constant, Charmaine is willing to trade her freedom and a host of other fundamental human rights in exchange for a clean and ostensibly safe home. And though Stan suspects the Positron/Consilience project can’t actually provide the ideal living arrangement it promises, he is also willing to sign away his rights to satisfy his wife and gain guaranteed employment.
The American prison-industrial complex arises as a theme when Ed, the leader of the project, explains how the Positron/Consilience twin towns concept is premised on the notion that prison labor can sustain a community. This idea is derived from the real-life phenomenon known as the American prison-industrial complex, a term that describes the mutually beneficial economic relationship between certain U.S. industries and the prisons that provide those industries with the low-cost labor of incarcerated people.
Because prison workers are denied many of the labor rights of non-imprisoned workers and are grossly underpaid, some critics of the prison-industrial complex have likened the arrangement to modern-day slavery. But Ed's project leans into and heightens this dependence of society on forced prison labor with the twin town project, which entails participants dividing their time between prison and home. With this would-be solution, Ed claims that the project will bring equality to the traditionally exploitative arrangement.
A year in the Positron project passes swiftly for Stan and Charmaine, who find themselves settling into the absurd routine of alternating between one month in a prison cell and one month in a detached home they share with their “alternates,” a couple who lives in the house while they’re in prison. However, Charmaine finds herself hopelessly attracted to “Max,” the man who lives in the house half the time. Despite their devotion to each other, Stan and Charmaine have seemingly always had trouble connecting sexually. Max’s commanding, dominant presence turns Charmaine into putty in his hands, and she is willing to fulfill every demand. In an instance of dramatic irony, Stan finds a note Charmaine sends “Max” under her assumed name and becomes obsessed with the fantasy with the woman. Unbeknownst to him, Stan is becoming obsessed with his own wife.
