Heart the Lover by Lily King: book review

Heart the Lover by Lily King 

Overview: The narrator makes it clear from the outset, she is writing a book, finally, about, in many ways, the one that got away. The first page reads: "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." The story then travels through three parts—the college years where the narrator meets Yash and the romance begins, a fragment in the middle when she has a young family and her life has turned away from him, and a third part where she's drawn back to him under dark and unfortunate circumstances, not in a romantic way but in a sense that ultimately offers reflective closure. Based on the flap copy that describes how Yash returns to her life "crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decision and deceptions of her youth," I was honestly expecting a very different book. Overall: 3

There is a delicate, quiet, almost fragile beauty to Writers and Lovers that is the reason I so deeply admire that book—especially in its depiction of doggedly chasing the "writer life" against the odds and how it renders loss of a parent, a topic that I usually get a dizzy vertigo around. I avoided reading the book for a long time, actually, because I knew that death of a parent was a central theme. But I started reading it one day and found myself unable to put it down. The book was undeniable. As silly as it sounds, I think it mended a little part of my soul. 

I didn't know about the connection between Heart the Lover and Writers and Lovers when I started it. Despite being a companion, or as Emma Straub called it in an interview with King, "an Irish twin," the cover, summary, nor anything else in the book indicates a connection between the two. It doesn't quite play out like a secret since it is mentioned in all of the interviews about the book, but I went into the novel without that knowledge, only piecing it together on the final page after thinking that some of the passive details felt familiar. It still strikes me as strange to obscure this fact in the marketing, hold on to it as a gotcha for those who've read her prior work, rather than use it as a marketing tool to draw readers in and own that this is a hybrid sequel/prequel. Knowing the connections between the books explained a lot but also made Heart the Lover even more disappointing than it already was. 

The book suffers on a number of levels. There's a general lack of deftness that is incredibly surprising from King. The book feels clunky in the way it draws its characters and lays out the plot. There's nothing to grasp onto in these people, no subtle nuance. They're a bunch of university students who think they're smart but only dubiously fit that description. They spend more time proving that point to one another than developing real, deeply felt relationships. Which brings me to the next failing of the novel. It is all incredibly surface. From the relationships to the layout of the story, there's a thinness here that doesn't work in the moment or upon reflection. The book exists in three deeply uneven sections. The first is during and right after university, which takes up most of the book, the second is a brief scene of Yash, the love interest, come to visit the main character who is now a full grown adult with a family, and the final segment takes place in the final days of Yash's life, in a hospital. Sorry, there is no full way to discuss this book without the spoiler. And, honestly, Yash's terminal illness is less a plot point than a device to try to save a floundering, confused storyline. 

Within these vastly timespanning sections, there is a great deal of summary, of hopping around, especially in the first section. It's like the camera only turns on when the love interest is around and then we go dark until the next moment he flickers back into the picture. We only know the main character in the context of the men she dates, first Sam and then Yash. She literally does not exist or only in brief, summarized sentences, when they're out of the picture for whatever reason. This is made worse by the fact that they never even call her her own name, only Daisy or Jordan. Really, this isn't a weird vaguely misogynistic thing, it turns out, it's actually a device to hold out on the reader who the narrator truly is until the trite reveal on the final page. Because, again, this book is a secret, I guess, companion novel. 

Now, this reveal that the narrator is Casey does make the giant excised parts of the book that made me think "wait, why'd we skip all the interesting bits" make sense because those interesting bits are in another book, a better book, Writers and Lovers. In trying to cover everything in Casey's adult life not captured in the original novel, Heart the Lover loses the beauty and nuance. It tries to tackle massive swaths of life and loses her heart in trying to do so. It somehow makes me like Casey less, and it doesn't deliver what the flap copy claims. This isn't a book about some great love that gets revisited, reevaluated with time. This is about a flimsy college relationship with a man who wasn't ready that ends and then his terminal illness and impending untimely death causes them to speak again after at least one of their lives has moved on. There's a suggestion his never did, but the story isn't from Yash's perspective, so we don't see the greater dent the love made. While Casey's family feels flat on the page, she seems generally happy with them, other than the fact that she puts her family's needs aside to be with Yash at the end. I never did feel the narrator and Yash's earth shattering connection in the prose to give weight to both part 1 or part 3. The contrived drama of the overstuffed hospital room at the end of the novel allows King to have this moment of reckoning on the misunderstandings in their love story, but she designs it this way to allow the conversation to happen in a way that doesn't threaten Casey's existing life. Yes, she almost forsakes her family, making suspect choices in regards to her own child's health to spend more time by Yash's side, but because Yash is inevitably going to die, this entire section is without consequence. To add to this, what ultimately drives them apart in their youth isn't some compelling force beyond their control. It is a very intentional choice by Yash that leaves you feeling like this is more a bittersweet end to a first love rather than an open-ended saga. King manages to kill the potential tension in a dynamic potentially rife with it around every corner. 

There is nothing in the love story in the opening section that convinces me that Yash is truly the one that got away, nothing in the middle interlude that convinces me that the narrator has spent any time besides the immediate aftermath of their break-up truly pining for him, and nothing in the final scenes that felt satisfying. Perhaps this would've been a better story from Yash's point of view because he is the one that makes the consequential choices that drive the relationship, and he seems much more scarred in the end by the shared experience. 

Beyond that, the lack of deftness I mentioned at the top shows most glaringly in these hospital scenes where the clunky discussions of death and an afterlife held none of the beauty I'd found in King's prior writing on the topic. Instead, these were open platitudes that did nothing but stoke my death anxiety. I cried at one point reading the ending, not because I was moved but just because it played exactly the right notes on my death vertigo keyboard. 

I've written this review a few times now, read enough of them to know there's a contingent of people who feel the way I do behind the people who found a deep, lovely connection with the novel that I don't begrudge in the slightest. I've grappled with how to talk about the book, the best ways to express my particular quibbles. Cause it does have things going for it. Even though I didn't enjoy the novel much, when I was actively reading it, I wanted to keep pushing on to the end. I wasn't ever drawn to it after setting it aside, but in the moment, I was fairly captivated. It's a fast read, which always has its appeal. There's something a bit propulsive there. 

But what I keep coming back to in my reflections is how deeply hollow the novel feels in my memory. This isn't delicately beautiful blown glass like the book whose central character this novel cannibalized. I think there's something to not returning to the same creative well. Letting things be. Because Casey's story was told perfectly the first time, the exact right portion of her life chosen. Rarely does one person or character have a novel-worthy life in its entirety. The novel is about the moment in that character's life that changed everything. Heart the Lover, while charming in moments, seems to be all the leftover bits.

"I've noticed that about people who had stable childhoods. They like to create their own problems."

"What the fuck, Sam. That's Hamlet, not the Bible."