When I was little, I liked to hide with the musty coats in the hall closet, next to the mops behind the kitchen door, behind the couch in the living room. I would listen to what people were saying, invisible but present. And sometimes it was less about what they were saying than what they weren’t. I learned to hear between the lines.
Reading Lily King is a little like that for me. She brings you into her story, but just barely. There’s a lot you need to listen for in between the lines.
In Heart the Lover, her latest novel, there is much quiet conversation that’s punctuated by audible sighs and gentle chuckles. There are professions of love and spewing of vitriol. There is youthful tenderness and adult pain.
Set over a span of time from the narrator’s college days to adulthood, the story features all that we love about King: complex relationships, angst, the arc and growth of the main character. Beautifully written, emotionally spare.
Jordan, as she’s nicknamed by her new and intellectually precocious friends, Sam and Yash, is the catalyst for an emerging love triangle. Initially Jordan is dating Sam—a sexually restrained Baptist who seems at odds with his faith—but it’s Yash whom she comes to love. His gentle wit and emotional awareness draw her deeply in over the course of the year they spend together in the house the boys are living in while their professor is on sabbatical. They stay up late talking about literature, cooking up sunny breakfasts, and playing a convoluted and competitive card game that involves both utter politeness and shrieks of victory.
The anticipated rift comes, as we know it will. Sam is angry, Yash is torn, and Jordan is left to move on.
And move on she does. The second section of the book introduces us to Jordan as a young mother, warmly tucked into her family and enjoying success as an author. Yash is there, visiting after many years. Jumping back in time, the narrator reveals some past details on why and how he left her devastated and angry after he chose Sam—again—over her. But we also see that the emotional pull is still there, that glimmer that shone so many years and experiences earlier. And it’s not an “either/or” kind of love this time but instead a love felt by a woman who now understands that she can feel strongly for both a current husband and a past boyfriend.
The final section jumps ahead again, a wrenching time in the narrator’s life when she and her family are confronting a chronic health issue with her eldest son. There’s a hopeful surgery on the horizon, but Jordan is catapulted back in time again with news from Sam about Yash.
The last section features some of King’s most poignant writing, with a sweet reference to Writers & Lovers. It is emotional in its spareness and incredibly moving in its maturity. The three old friends are the same and changed, all over a few short hours. The weight of their friendship, in all its iterations, is so clearly heavy, and yet has determined who they have become. Heart the Lover has all the life forces King’s readers have come to anticipate and adore—love, friendship, transformation, and forgiveness.
