Heart the Lover. By Lily King. Audiobook

Emma Smith

I devoured Heart the Lover in three feverish sittings, utterly consumed by King’s portrait of how life can interrupt and delay matters of the heart, and yet still grant us a bounty of beauty and purpose. Or, failing that, a plot we must one way or another accept and make meaning of after the fact.

The love story between Yash and Jordan is the book’s beating furnace, at once epic and star-crossed as well as intimate and tender. I found myself yearning for it to come to a satisfying "HEA" resolution, even as I understood that ship had sailed and that Jordan was in a loving, stable, and giving relationship with her two beautiful boys who needed her. And that she was perfectly fine. Fulfilled. Successful. Doing what she had always dreamed of doing. (Many good things look nothing like we expect them to.)

The novel brought to mind Celine Song's gorgeously quiet film Past Lives in which two would-be lovers contemplate what could have been, and ultimately go their separate ways. It is a heartbreaking but also in some sense correct dissolution. Not all romances succeed; in the real world, where we live and what we do for a living (not to mention the nuances and flightiness of the heart!) not all plots achieve their desired resolutions.

I had this vision of the novel’s characters hurling themselves against King’s plot: "Please let Yash come to me; please don’t let Yash die." And yet.

The book is all desires deferred, plot lines abandoned, narremes loosened from their brackets. Things that could almost be. Things that should have been. Murky decisions born of complex loyalties.

Names are displaced, obscured, left ajar. We do not even discover the protagonist’s true name until the very last sentence of the book, after she has been dubbed Daisy, then Jordan, then (intimately) Hink.

Meanwhile, Sam initially signs an apology letter directed to Jordan called Heart the Lover. A moniker conceived by Yash and later adopted by him. But ultimately pinned to Jordan’s husband, Silas, during a round of cards towards the end of the book. And even that phrase, the very title of the book, opens itself up to ambiguity. It could read like a command (as in "like the lover!") or an epithet (as in "the lover is called heart").

So what is King doing with all of these sliding doors and slippages?

A lot, and deftly. The novel is a portrait of the power of early or first romances. The way they shape and define our desire and expectation but are more often than not not the only engine for our adult lives. It is also a treatise on the inexorability of time. The way days keep marching on, and we can carry heavy regret and bitterness if we are not careful, but that we can also find new loves and new lives if we stay open to the unfolding shape of the present. I loved the reveal of the protagonist’s name at the very end of the novel.

She is in that moment finally plucked from her heart affair with Yash and planted firmly in the present, where she is needed by her son, who awaits brain surgery, and loved by her husband.

The conceit of the card game fascinated me, and felt like a handy metaphor for the novel’s operations and ethos. Here we have characters trying to "fill a family" by trading different cards featuring different roles between one another. There is a sensation of yearning, a desire for completion. The will to "fill a hand" with the correct assortment of people. And yet, a lot of the game is, quite literally, out of their hands. As with life, no matter how much we strategize, we cannot fully account for the way other players will play their cards, and we never have the full picture of who holds what until the very end. We must simply play the best we can with our limited understanding of the state of things.