Heart the Lover
By Lily King
Heart the Lover
By Lily King
Fathers, watch out.
No, I have not yet read The English Teacher by Lily King, out of fear, probably. But I have read King’s books Father of the Rain and Writers and Lovers. It’s comfy, given what I’ve read and what I haven’t, to address you guys, you Dads out there. Let’s skip those English teachers sitting around trying to decide what to bake next since our grades are due.
King rolls out a fast-paced pastry with this one, almost as if compelled just to get it all in the oven before it’s gone. Her novels Father and Writers do not read like this – they are calmly paced and do not break into divisions like Heart the Lover. What to make of King’s structural decision this time?
The characters in Heart the Lover so I hear, from the Gatsby-themed book club that ran way over, fit neatly into Jordan the golfer-type slots. This seems too easy. Let’s say we read King’s book and we hear Fitzgerald in her pages. So what? Everything is easier when we deflect in this manner. From now on, let’s not read things and say they are other things. Let’s read things and say they are us.
That love we let go, that was our love to let go. If Daisy and Tom built their marriage on other loves, that’s their business. One of the problems with reading stories is their slipperiness. We apply them easily to the lives of others and even to the lives of other fictional characters. Meet one young woman in a new novel working just to exist in a professor’s house, she’s just like this other young woman in an older novel. She isn’t you. If she is you, you can push away those memories and go back to the other pretend woman in the book she resembles. But she is you.
Heart the Lover importantly dwells on two themes, games and time, one which has changed and one which has resisted change. We still play games. It is time that has changed, the way we navigate and communicate completely altering our experience of time. Heart the Lover crafts a stunning time capsule of earlier days when we could wait, not be in touch, just wait until we saw someone to say something. This is its absolute, distinguishing triumph. Like “The Voice of the Rich Pudding,” written by Gertrude Dorsey Brown in 1907 or so, it sketches what it meant to communicate differently back then.
Anyone study abroad in the eighties? Maybe you remember a landline telephone in the hallway, maybe you spoke with home once every couple of weeks? That’s called trust, otherwise known as faith. In a world without regular church or faith-based ritual as part of our routines, what a tragic, tragic loss of faith we all feel every Monday. We cannot learn what William James called “the will to believe” given our ready reach, our immediately available communications. We cannot believe, or even wish to believe, or trust, or will to trust, or have faith in an age where everything is one instant confirmation away. Try teaching students today about suspension of disbelief. It takes a minute. Try being a father or an English teacher.
What is this, you ask, like the simple son at the Passover sedar. What is this highjacking of a perfectly fine love triangle book? It’s not a highjacking, it’s just shining a light on a dark corner that is there, right in the pages. We need to read the whole book, not only the parts that remind us of other books. That’s like erasing the book King wrote and swapping out something we already know and don’t have to consider in a fresh or new way.
Here’s something scary about erasure that no one wants to talk about: AI is erasing things that have already been erased. It’s double erasing. Consider Gertrude Dorsey Brown who wrote the most brilliant story ever conceived on the anxiety surrounding the telegram. “The Voice of the Rich Pudding,” like Heart the Lover, is about communication. Specifically, it is about too much information and the way it just appears in the ether, much the way Heart the Lover concerns a style of thinking, believing and hearing that has been erased by cell phones.
These days, Brown’s story has been erased for a second time when our search engines swivel to “guide” us to what they know. Today, AI is the first source of information we get when we search online. These “first voices” are rocking our worlds. The first erasure of Brown’s voice happened when people decided to listen to voices of other writers in English class, call them voices like those of Herman Melville, recognizable voices. So goes the voice of the pudding Dorsey wrote.
When you’ve already been erased as a woman of color writing short stories like “The Voice of the Rich Pudding,” stories later read in English class only by people who found them in an anthology of local color or regionalist writing in college, did you think you could be erased for a second time? Just try searching the title “The Voice of the Rich Pudding” and see what you get, unless you put Dorsey’s name in the search engine. You get Herman Melville, that’s what you get. That’s because AI decided that it knows Herman Melville and he probably wrote your story.
Now let’s apply what we’ve learned.
Imagine King’s title written as “Hear the Lover,” not the title King chose for her book. She would be directing us to read in this way, to read and think about hearing, listening or talking. Heart the Lover (which cannot be written without “hear,” you cannot spell “heart” without “hear,”) is deviously titled. We cannot wait to find out what the real title means and when we find out, it’s good. King may be playing the role of activist for digital detox when she chooses this title. Readers need to sit around and wait to figure her title out. The author did not hand it to us on a platter. She forced us to experience what the characters experience, the sitting around and waiting and figuring it out. As readers, we must trust her. We must have faith in the unknown. We must wait.
When we get nervous, we reach for what we know. AI gets nervous and reaches for Melville. The people at book club get nervous and reach for Gatsby. Read this book without Gatsby and without talking to anyone about it. Let it be you and the text and then take away the text and let it be you.
Let’s say you are a Dad. You need to be trusted. Let’s say you are an English teacher. Same. Let’s say you are anyone walking anywhere at any time, not just stuck in an elevator as the proverbial hypothetical goes. You need to put down, not just the duckie, not just the phone, but both the phone and the duckie. As we say at the beginning of class, let’s disconnect from our tech. For the love of us all.