I don’t remember a ton about Writers and Lovers, Lily King’s prior novel featuring the protagonist Casey Peabody. Heart the Lover starts before the events of Writers and Lovers and ends after, making it sort of a prequel and sequel in one. At the start, Casey is a university student, majoring in English and working her way through college after giving up her scholarship by quitting the golf team. She meets two brainy, literary boys in Sam and Yash, best friends who live together in an apartment apparently gifted to them by a favorite professor for the school year. Casey, whom the boys actually call “Jordan” in a reference to the female golfer from The Great Gatsby, originally takes to Sam, but his earnest adherence to his faith causes issues for them. Long after Sam and “Jordan” are done, she finds herself drawn to Yash despite knowing it’s probably a bad idea. Yash, despite being much more compatible with Jordan, isn’t a perfect boyfriend either, and a devastating decision he makes at a crucial juncture leads to an irreparable rift between them.
Then the book leaps over the events of the earlier novel, and many other years besides, to find Casey in middle age and married to a character from Writers and Lovers with two children. When she receives some news from Sam about Yash, she decides to see him and get some closure, with perhaps a long-delayed revelation in tow.
I listened to the audiobook version, which I always mention because I’m still not sure how much it impacts my evaluation of a book. In the case of Heart the Lover, I must confess that I do not see what so many other reviewers are apparently seeing in it. I saw NPR refer to the novel as “erotically charged” and thought I might need to contact someone to see if I’d been sent the wrong book. Others have described the book as romantic or deeply affecting, and there I am also sort of perplexed.
To me, none of the events or characters in Heart the Lover really hit home. The novel is quite short, with the result that the plot feels really rushed. It’s theoretically possible to cover decades in a character’s life in just 250 pages, but King didn’t do that here. The whole thing basically hinges on a single, cliched revelation to work at all, making it pretty weak in my opinion.
King is a strong writer. I particularly admired her book Euphoria, but Heart the Lover doesn’t measure up.
