“Heart the Lover” Is a Complicated, Realistic Love Story
“Lily King’s modern take on the classic love-triangle is a hopeful yet realistic ode to young love and the ways relationships change over time”
I read Lily King’s new novel on a two-day work trip earlier this week. It turned out to be the perfect book for the trip: short enough to finish before I got home, but emotional enough that I kept thinking about it afterward.
Heart the Lover is a decades-spanning, sort-of coming-of-age story told across two periods in its characters’ lives. The narrator, nicknamed Jordan by her classmates Sam and Yash, meets them during her senior year of college. She is quickly drawn into their friendship, which becomes a love triangle that shapes all three of their lives. Decades later, they meet again, facing the consequences of choices they made when they were young.
The novel strikes a precarious balance between exploring the hazards of sentimentality and embracing the possibilities of tenderness and grace. It begins with the heightened intensity of a young-adult romance, asking characters with so little experience to place enormous significance on their college relationships. (I don’t mean that as a criticism—just an observation of natural intensity that’s part of being young.) It then moves beyond the heady days of crushes and seminars into the deeper griefs and harder choices of adulthood.
The story invests so much in the loves and losses of youth that, at times, I found it difficult to take those experiences as seriously as the characters do. Eventually, though, what initially seems overly dramatic becomes more understandable as we see how deeply those experiences have stayed with Jordan.
I won’t say much more about the plot because the final section is best experienced without knowing what happens. It takes place during a reunion of the now middle-aged trio, and it is devastating. King gets the details exactly right: the ordinary small talk, the slightly unreal feeling of the moment, and the sporadic awareness that time is running out for certain conversations.
Ultimately, Heart the Lover is about screwing up, wising up, finding yourself, and realizing what you may have lost along the way. To quote Elena Ferrante, another great writer of women’s lives, it is also about “the velocity with which life is consumed.” Reading the novel feels less like watching Jordan from the outside and more like spending time inside her thoughts and memories.
What I appreciated most is that King writes about desire without either romanticizing or condemning it. She is interested in creativity, restraint, regret, indecision, forgiveness, and the ways love can make you feel both secure and completely unsettled. The book doesn’t try to turn any of this into a neat lesson. It is thoughtful, deeply sad, and very moving.
It also went by so fast. I finished it by the end of my work trip, and I cried through what felt like half of the final act. It’s a short novel, but it stays with you.
I loved reading Heart the Lover, and it made me want to read more Lily King. Writers & Lovers is next.
I do, however, hate this book cover.
