Heart the Lover by Lily King shares some themes with What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, the book I reviewed two days ago. They’re both set against the backdrop of academia. King focuses on four young people in college, their spirit and energy, academic pressures, dating issues, insecurities, crushes, parties, and card games (one of which gives the book its title.) McEwan’s principal characters are the professors, poets and researchers, also with their sexual relationships and neuroses.  Both books have clever repartee and multiple literary discussions. Even if you weren’t an English major, readers can be moved by Lily King’s talent for capturing both the exciting and daunting aspects of their own college years,

King’s narrator is a woman whose name (Jordan) we don’t learn until well into the book. She is romantically entangled with two of her three housemates. We move serially through the ups and downs of the relationships.

Heart the Lover then leaps into the characters in their middle age, where the four have chosen separate paths, but, in different ways, their ties to each other remain quite profound. Life has become more complicated. Their loves are more mature and take different forms, shaped by life’s realities (career, marriage, health, children). Characters become better communicators. They struggle to deal with their problems, not always with the most desirable outcomes.

King develops the novel in a linear way, the form more straightforward than the sophisticated and intriguing time-bending writing of McEwan. Though many of King’s story lines resonate with familiarity, she brings fresh perspective to those life inflection points. The author treats her characters tenderly, just as those characters, despite some rocky interactions in their twenties, come to treat each other 20 years later.  Heart the Lover is well conceived and well delivered. It’s a pleasing book that will hold your attention even if it doesn’t make your current list of top ten.

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