Heart the Lover
At the start of Lily King’s Heart the Lover, a novel of three parts, our narrator is in her final year of college. While the school she attends is never named, for those of us who went to either UNC (the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) or Duke in the early 80s, her world is achingly familiar. (King is a UNC grad.) If the standard for superb world-building is Yes, it was just like that, King has nailed both time and place. It’s all here: walking past windows blasting Toto’s Africa, sitting in dingy dorm rooms on sticky sofas, going to keg parties and downing bad beer, doing everything but on narrow twin beds. I could almost smell the weed and hear my friends too arguing over which Dylan song was the best.
We meet our narrator as she sits in an English Lit seminar. Though she is an excellent writer—her professor reads her work aloud to the class—the real brains in the class are two best friends, Sam and Yash. They are, she says, scholars: men who not only know all the intricacies of Ovid’s Metamorphoses but are translating it into Latin after having done so in French. They argue about literature and ideas, cite obscure books with ease, and challenge their professors, all of whom adore them. They’re in the competitive Honors program and live in the house of their Chaucer professor, who is away on sabbatical.
Soon, this young woman—whom the boys have renamed Jordan; she came to school on a golf scholarship, now lost—is dating Sam, making breakfast in the kitchen with Yash, and neglecting her other friends. Sam and Yash and their cerebral home have become Jordan’s. It’s clear, as her old roommate notes, it’s not going to end well.
But oh, while it lasts it is transportive—for both Jordan and the reader. Sam and Yash may be arrogant young men, but they are mesmerizingly so. They are witty, often kind, and enviably serious about ideas. They both treasure Jordan and yet do not see her as their intellectual equal. Still, as the love triangle unfolds, it is clear that Jordan is central to both of them, and that whatever this arrangement is, it matters profoundly to all three.
It does, of course, end badly and suddenly the novel jumps almost twenty years ahead. Sam and Yash, still best friends, have lives other than the ones they imagined, and Jordan is now the celebrated writer of the three. But the past never quite stays where we place it, and one day it arrives unannounced at Jordan’s door, carrying with it all the hurt, betrayal, love, and loss she left decades earlier.
We are, of course, an amalgam of the decisions we made in our youth. And who among us hasn’t harbored what ifs about what we did and didn’t do when the future seemed almost limitless. But for our trio, regrets about the past are less painful than the reality of the present. What Jordan, Yash, and Sam experience in their forties will indeed break your heart. But what makes the novel worth reading is not that it spares its characters suffering but rather that it adamantly refuses the idea, common in contemporary fiction, that suffering renders love foolish or beside the point.
Heart the Lover, the internet tells me, is something of a companion piece to Writers and Lovers, a novel–I’ve not read it–about Jordan’s life between the then and the now of Heart the Lover. This, perhaps, explains my only real complaint about this book: the jump from the characters’ collegiate lives to their forties is abrupt, almost to the point of confusion. I could piece together where they were, if not quite how they got there. (I was, however—as I suspect many female readers might be—able to predict the last line.) I would have liked more time with Jordan, Yash, and Sam, but the time I did have with them, I loved. I suspect most readers will too.