“You knew I’d write a book about you someday. You said once that I’d dredged up the whole hit parade minus you. I’ll never know how you’d tell it. For me it begins here. Like this.”
So opens Lily King’s magnificent sixth novel, Heart the Lover. A companion of sorts to her previous book, Writers and Lovers, it returns to the same protagonist, centering on her time in college. The story begins when she meets Sam and his best friend Yash — two intellectuals whose world she becomes swept up in. They bestow her with the Gatsby-inspired nickname “Jordan,” and her senior year quickly becomes a tangle of witty banter, literary discussions, and a raucous card game from which the title originates.
In their company, friendship deepens as do her own intellectual ambitions. Jordan begins a romantic relationship with Sam, but slowly realizes that Yash, in all his fervor and offhand charm, embodies the kind of love she desires. Around its halfway mark, the novel skips in time, cloaking the aftermath of Jordan and Yash’s ardent, volatile relationship. The last act, fixated on a few days decades later, is a culmination of all that has been unresolved and misunderstood. Jordan, who feels so shaped by these boys, finally realizes how central she herself has been to their lives and story. She is forced to reckon with not just her own grief, but the role she has played in the emotional ecosystem the three have constructed.
King’s prose is immersive without being showy. It has a kneading quality — pressing into a moment, folding it back, testing the tension. The familiar elements of a collegiate love story are present, but they are handled with restraint. Nothing is strained or exaggerated for effect. Even at its most conventional, the novel never feels manipulative. The emotional pitch rises naturally from the characters’ limitations: what they fail to say, what they fail to see. While the novel has every chance to fall into cliche, King’s sincerity steers it away from being saccharine or melodramatic. A skillful writer, King handles both the heavier themes and the sweeter moments of her novel with finesse. Heart the Lover stands as an artificially constructed meditation on how people inevitably shape our lives, and how we, perhaps unconsciously, shape theirs.
This article was first published in The Franklin Post.
