Hardships, Remembered with Pleasure
Montana Patrick Heart the Lover by Lily King Grove Press, 2025. A deep-felt connection between two young, aspiring writers forms the center of Heart the Lover, Lily King’s beautiful sixth novel. The story begins in the 1980s, at an east coast university where an unnamed narrator (nicknamed Jordan, after Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby) and a young man named Sam meet in a literature class. Jordan and Sam begin dating, and she is eventually introduced to Yash, Sam’s housemate. The two become close and form a bond that grows to surpass her relationship with Sam, and proves to become one of the most important in her life. Jordan and Yash begin sharing their days with each other, trading in-jokes and nurturing each other’s shared love of writing and reading. From their final semesters of college, to their navigation of the triumphs and pitfalls of early adulthood and beyond, Jordan and Yash continue to rotate in each other’s orbit, until one day Yash leaves. After a time jump in which we see Jordan having moved on from her life with Yash, another sees the now middle-aged pair reconnected under tragic circumstances; an unexpected illness provokes them to meet and fill in each other’s ‘lost’ years.
256
BOOK R EV I EW
There are few writers who capture the interior lives and loneliness of other writers so well. While Heart the Lover can be read as an entirely contained, stand-alone work, readers who are familiar with King’s previous novel, Writers and Lovers, will appreciate the way the two are in conversation with each other, and the Russian doll-like layers in which they are connected. The way Lily King depicts love and life and grief so honestly—and in a way that, while not exactly understated, feels so beautiful and ringing with truth—brings to mind the work of writers like Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett. The emotions never come off as heavy-handed or forced, but rather just right. Like any novel wherein other novels play such a key role in the lives of the characters, there are many great literary allusions in Heart the Lover. From its Fitzgerald references to those that are farther flung, as with Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness’ seminal novel Independent People, King’s novel will really sing in the hands of admirers of great literary fiction. Indeed the acts of recalling, and of making connections, are built into the novel’s very structure and instrumental to its effects. The book’s most powerful moments resonate to the extent they create a physical sensation, a kind of stinging in the heart that will stay with the reader well past the novel’s end. As Yash says near the novel’s close, quoting Virgil’s Aeneid: “Someday we will remember even these our hardships with pleasure.”