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3 hours ago
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The university experience is a risky business in fiction. Generally, the feelings are intense, but the stakes are low; it’s all very formative for the individual character, but it can feel a bit trivial to anyone else. In fact, reading an account of someone’s university days is surely only one or two stages removed from having to hear about the dream they had last night.
So my heart initially sank at Heart the Lover’s cover promise that our main character would soon be “swept into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games” – good grief, save me from the raucous card games! But obviously the caveat here is what it always is: a good writer will make it matter. I had faith, therefore, that everything would be all right, since Lily King is an exceptionally good writer. Indeed, she could probably write a book-length account of her most recent dream and I would still rush to read it.
King is a well-established name in the US, and it’s about time she reached a wider audience over here. In her hands, this story of first love between college kids is vivid, moving and witty. It unspools into a searching exploration of loss, mortality and the inexorability of time. “It’s just this long tender farewell to youth,” the narrator says early on, referring to a short story she has read. King’s novel got me straight in the heart. It hurt.
The narrator is not named until the end, although if you’ve read King’s brilliant previous novel Writers & Lovers you’ll know her name already. Heart the Lover is a companion of sorts to that book, both a prequel and a sequel, while also capable of standing on its own. There is just one slightly perplexing reveal – which I won’t spoil – that may feel like a rewriting of history to fans of Writers & Lovers, though I think most readers will be in a forgiving mood.
We begin as the narrator meets Sam, and then his best friend Yash, in her senior year of college (let the academic fervour, quick-fire banter and raucous card games commence: the book’s title is a reference to one of these card games). It looks set to be a classic love triangle, but this is not the angle King is most interested in, and what we get instead is a two-hander, a more focused love story. Despite this, the book has a rich cast of background characters, each of whom King presents with precision and care. At the midway point comes a time jump, and the second half of the story presents middle age butting up against the echoes of youthful intensity, with the shifting of relationships and character over time. Characteristically, King pays attention not just to what we lose, but to what we gain.
The novel is awash with literary references, and yes, I may have balked at the aforementioned “academic fervour”, but actually it’s a delight: this is a book in love with the experience of reading, precise about the way certain stories and ideas powerfully affect us at particular stages in our lives. “You know how you can remember exactly when and where you read certain books?” the narrator says. “A great novel, a truly great one, not only captures a particular fictional experience, it alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life while you’re reading it.” King maintains a lovely balancing act: she is an unapologetic English major (a type as much as a biographical feature), but her books, tightly plotted and compulsively readable, are for everyone.
The first half might be seen as a “young” book, excellent on the intensity and desire and energy of youth. It then becomes a grown-up novel: wearier, more poignant, and yet still – and this is not a decision every writer would have made – hopeful. The arc of the story suggests bleakness, but the delivery resists it. To say farewell to youth, according to King, is not to say farewell to love, or to hope. “Isn’t love a form of hope?” the narrator asks at one point. We may be left feeling melancholy at the end of Heart the Lover, but, crucially, we are not disheartened.
Havoc by Rebecca Wait is published by Riverrun. Heart the Lover by Lily King is published by Canongate (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
