Big Books: Heart the Lover and Katabasis

I’ve been really trying to expand my reading horizons the past year or so—from fantasy to romance to science fiction to police procedurals. One type of book I’ve been experimenting with, a real rarity for me previously, is big American bestsellers, the books an amorphous and vague “everyone” is talking about. I never mean to avoid these, and there have been of course a few in the past I enjoyed, but so much of what is recommended to me is either Canadian, very weird or literary or niche in some way, they just never seemed to come across my shelf. I didn’t think I wouldn’t like these books that so many people like, but I was surprised to find that I often like them a lot. Who knew, I’m not that niche after all!

I read RF Kuang’s Yellowface last year because it was a gossipy novel about the American publishing industry—I will pretty much always read something like that. The plotting was rather tortured and, I neither understood the ending nor figured out whether it was Kuang or her protagonist who was willfully obtuse about what constitutes “failure” for a literary author (in the novel, it’s a book deal at a big five publisher directly out of undergrad and $25 000—but no Netflix deal. I’m sure many of us in the literary community laughed about this all the way from our day jobs to our side hustles.) But! It’s a fast-paced and exciting book, there’s plenty of dishy secrets about the uber-successful and very beautiful and insecure dead novelist that Kuang seems to have based on herself (I know, right???) and the whole thing felt salacious and fun and insider baseball even though it actually mainly isn’t. BUT there were some real insights and hard questions on voice appropriation and how publishers, editors, and agents—and readers—treat the question of when it is appropriate to appropriate and who gets to do it, and how racism plays a role in all kinds of ways, subtle and not. There are points and ideas in this book that really hit me, and that I’ve never seen expressed elsewhere. This is mainly not a smart book but there’s a handful of really really insightful bits.

This year I read Kuang’s Katabasis because it’s a bookclub book (Yellowface was too, but it was my pick!) This time, her topic is grad school instead of publishing, and there’s a magical realist twist. Main character Alice Law is doing her PhD at Oxford in theoretical magic and her powerful and important advisor has died. If she wants to complete her thesis without losing clout and having to have a lesser advisor—a desperate necessity!!—she will have to go to Hell to get his soul back and…reincarnate him. The reincarnation part actually never makes good sense but the exploration of Hell is more or less Dantean crossed with what I understand to be standard romantasy—because the cutest boy in the whole department, Peter Murdoch, is also advised by the dead professor, and tags along for the ride.

I did not care about the descriptions of Hell but I guess they were well done enough—maybe if I’d read more Dante I would be either more or less impressed, not sure. They were VERY LONG—the book is enormous, around 600 pages, and the extremely detailed descriptions of the various circles of hell are the main reasons why. The romance between Alice and Peter is pretty tropey—they long for each other but they both have SECRETS and thus spend years, and most of the book, never saying a single honest word about their feelings ever. There’s a cold night and only a single tiny blanket, misunderstandings, betrayal, a brutal sacrifice for true love, blah blah blah.

The romance and the inventive hellscape are the main things this book was about and I did not like either of them, so what did I like? The treatment of the academic universe, which is fairly insightful without being totally so—much like the treatment of publishing in Yellowface. I thought it was a copout to set the novel in a sort of fictionalized 1980s, when women were newly being admitted to Oxford and no one had a cellphone—there’s a creaky lie in a lot of books and movies these days, pushing current problems like racism and sexism back into the past, as if to exonerate current culprits. BUT there are a couple of really sharp and insightful scenes about how young women who grow up with feminism can grow to dismiss it, as perhaps those of us who grow up with vaccines and without measles could be in danger of not even knowing what vaccines are for. Once again, I felt like Kuang is much smarter than her book, but the book is actually for another purpose entirely—when I started reading the first few pages, I actually wondered if it was for children, though I realized quickly that it isn’t, quite. I didn’t like Katabasis much but it was a low-stress read and I respected it was intended for another audience, who would probably like it very much indeed.

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On the other hand, the audience Heart the Lover by Lily King is intended for is me. This book is a prequel-sequel to King's Writers and Lovers. I loved the earlier book but felt fell apart at the end. Same with the latter, only—worse. There's so much that's wonderful about the first two acts of the Heart the Lover—well, really the first act, and then a little coda in the middle. It's about young love and heartbreak and more love and creativity and literature and intellect and betrayal and it's all so passionate and rich and engrossing—other reviews have commented that King writes "fast" and I know what they mean. I just wanted to go and go and go with these characters. And then at the moment of peak mayhem, the book jumps ahead more than 20 years and calms down, eventually right down into deep sadness. I enjoyed reading the final section because King writes so well and I wanted to see what happened but I absolutely did not buy it. The first chunk of the book struck me as characters living as people live, humanity explored on the page, and the last chunk was like…a thought experiment. An interesting idea, interestingly written, but we are no longer in the realm of realistm. I would be eager to discuss this with others who have read the book and disagree, because reviews never discuss the ending, and I am a known tight-ass about this type of thing. Here’s what I struggled with at the end, without giving too much away: Only in novels are people so deeply enmeshed in relationships that ended decades ago but also never able to ask a single question about anything that happened. I am not a parent myself but I'd also be curious if any parent would do what the protagonist does in the final chapters. It just was so uncomfortably unrealistic and melodramtic, in a what felt like a fairly plausible book previously. This was the structure of Writers and Lovers too and I didn't mind it as much, but this one was more annoying to me, probably because I was so deeply invested in “what happens” in this book, and then it turned out “what happens” was not going to make any sense in a real-world human experience kind of way, which is frustrating.

Nevertheless, I absolutely love Lily King’s writing, and I love this character (at her best) in both books she appears in. I also love the way King writes specifically about being a writer, and a reader—she lets you really see on the page, at least sometimes, what it is to live with books and words. And as I said in Writers and Lovers, I very very much related to this character, at least in most sections, especially when she’s thinking/talking about her creative work. There’s a few moments where this self-effacing young woman is studying creative writing and smug boys come along and say things very much akin to, “If you were smart, you wouldn’t need anyone to teach you how to write, you’d just WRITE, like I am going to eventually do with the excellent book I am planning.” I remember so many such conversations from my youth, and honestly they still happen. King is careful to underline that none of the male characters who say such things ever write anything of value whereas the protagonist is hugely successful. That grudge feels personal and delightful. Lily King is not, for me, a closer, but she is such a wonderful writer in other ways and I will definitely be happy to read more of her books, anytime.

*

Of course, you have to take all my opinions with a lot of salt, because I think this is genius.