Book Review: Heart the Lover by Lily King

Here I go, falling in love with characters in books again. 

I cried funeral tears, first love tears, abandonment tears at Lily King’s Heart the Lover. I fell in love in undergrad as a creative writing student myself. A year and change later, I, too, was living abroad, but in China, so distant from my love. When he broke up with me, I went into a panic. W We eventually repaired and, now, almost twenty years later, he is my husband. I wonder how much of this book would have been my life if things went differently. 

Heart the Lover is unbelievably romantic in that unimaginable way of being unthinkably intelligent and sophisticated at 22 years old. Only the classics for these characters, read cover to cover AND in the original language WITH the most famous passages all memorized. There are late-night conversations about ideas and plans for a never-ending future. Cosmopolitan debates about geopolitics and warm summer nights partying at neighborhood bars until they close. Living with six other people in nasty-ass houses and making tips to pay for all those nights out and the rent and student loan payment aren’t yet due. I got a glimpse of that mythical consummate college life in grad school once, for a brief instance. It was incredible. 

Heart the Lover is a novel of assuming people know the intentions in our hearts, assuming they will fix what feels broken and make all right within us. It’s more than misunderstandings; it’s craving what we need from those we love and searching for solutions in other people. It’s figuring out how to find a way through before the ultimate “too late.”

Still, the very first page I audibly grunted with disdain. I’d never known King’s writing before; I was skeptical of the earnestness right off the bat. Lo, I trust my dearest friend who recommended the book. I was quickly overcome. 

As I continued to read, I was filled with so much love and glee and grief. It’s a quick read, made quicker after I burned my finger touching a frying pan, and the pain kept me from sleeping. A few hours after I finished the book, I picked it up again and reread it by the next evening. I reread looking for one specific clue I thought I’d missed that would have unlocked the book’s ending. No, I didn’t find it. Mostly, I wanted to spend more time with Yash. 

King acknowledges race and class throughout the book, but more in a “that’s the air we breathe in” sort of way. She shows the minor and deft ways people more female, more working class, less white maneuver, shrug at, and push back against the behaviors of those more male, more wealthy, more white, who seem to assume these maneuverings are mere misunderstandings of their intellect or a simple difference of opinion, something to be easily excused, not an interconnected system of oppression. More often the narrative chalks it up to the differences between boys and girls in love and in youth. The nods feel necessary to the making of the book if not fully examined.

There’s a magnificent withholding until the last line of the book; when I first read it, I was confused. When I finally understood, I wept harder, grieving for those I’ve lost, and the futures we won’t have together. 

Thank you Los Angeles Public Library for letting me borrow the book.