Earlier this month, I kept picking up and putting down Lily King's new novel, Heart the Lover. I love King's writing but the opening section was hard for me to take — not in a grisly Cormac McCarthy or scary Stephen King kind of way — but in an "Ugh, I remember being that girl, that age" kind of way.
Heart the Lover opens in a college class of the 1980s. The professor, a man, is teaching 17th-century British literature and he's selected a student's essay — a creative piece — to read aloud. But, first, he holds up the essay to remark on "its vulgar packaging" — the fact that it's typed on "neon-orange" paper.
The embarrassed student-author is a young woman nicknamed "Jordan." She tells us that Halloween construction paper was all she had available when she was typing the essay on deadline. Here's how Jordan, decades later, will remember what follows:
“There are two smart guys in the class. They sit up front together .... The professor runs things by them so often I assume they’re his grad school TAs. When my essay gets passed back to me, they both turn to watch where it goes. After that day, the copper-haired one [Sam] begins migrating back. Three classes later, he takes a seat beside me. Soon he is walking me across campus .... We talk exclusively about the class. ‘He’s not focusing enough on Cromwell,’ [Sam] says, .... I agree. What else can I do? I am a mere student, and he is a scholar. That much is clear right away. ... And Sam isn’t even a grad student. He’s a senior, like me. Later I go to the library and read about who Cromwell was, ...
Ugh. Now, young Jordan is no pushover — she's ambitious, putting herself through college on loans and waitressing jobs and she harbors a barely formed desire to be a writer. But her path will take longer to carve out.
The well-read bright boys, meanwhile, house sit and are invited to dinners by their male professors. They're the heirs apparent to the kingdom of books and ideas; Jordan's gifts are wrapped in the wrong packaging, just like her orange construction paper essay.
King's writing is so vivid, so immediate, that her opening sparked flashbacks of my own time in such classrooms, but sexism is just the way things are, not the subject of this intensely moving novel. Heart the Lover is both a prequel and a sequel to King's novel, Writers & Lovers, which made my "best of the year" list in 2020. "Jordan" is the nickname that those two clever college boys give Casey Peabody, who some of us readers have met already in Writers & Lovers.
In that earlier novel, Casey is older, a 31-year-old who's been waitressing and writing her first novel for over six years. Heart the Lover suggests a big reason why Casey would have been stuck in her 20s. But the structure of Heart the Lover is so ingenious, its emotional charge so compelling, you don't have to have read the earlier novel to be drawn into what's essentially a great triangular love story.
The young Casey (again, here nicknamed Jordan) is pursued by Sam and then by his best friend, the other star student in that classroom, a boy named Yash. The "first love" erotic energy between Jordan and Yash is off the charts and the two envision an artsy adult life together in New York. Yash, however, feels conflicted by his loyalty to Sam and by his need to safeguard his autonomy. Guess which way the seesaw tips and who gets crushed beneath?
I'll stop the plot summary there because readers deserve to experience for themselves the devastation of the final section of Heart the Lover, which takes place at a reunion of the now middle-aged trio in a dying man's hospital room. If you've ever lived through such a moment you'll appreciate how King renders the all of it: the banality of visitors' small talk; the unreal sense of melodrama, the sporadic awareness that a deadline for final conversations is approaching.
Heart the Lover is about screwing up, wising up, finding yourself and realizing what you may have lost in the process. To quote Elena Ferrante, another great chronicler of women's lives, Heart the Lover is also about the "velocity with which life is consumed."
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