"Earlier this month, I kept picking up and putting down Lily King's new novel, Heart the Lover. I love King's writing but the opening section was hard for me to take not in a grisly Cormac McCarthy or scary Stephen King kind of way but in an "Ugh, I remember being that girl, that age" kind of way. Heart the Lover opens in a college class of the 1980s."
"The professor, a man, is teaching 17th-century British literature and he's selected a student's essay a creative piece to read aloud. But, first, he holds up the essay to remark on "its vulgar packaging" the fact that it's typed on "neon-orange" paper. The embarrassed student-author is a young woman nicknamed "Jordan." She tells us that Halloween construction paper was all she had available when she was typing the essay on deadline. Here's how Jordan, decades later, will remember what follows:"
"There are two smart guys in the class. They sit up front together .... The professor runs things by them so often I assume they're his grad school TAs. When my essay gets passed back to me, they both turn to watch where it goes. After that day, the copper-haired one [Sam] begins migrating back. Three classes later, he takes a seat beside me."
Heart the Lover opens in a 1980s college literature class where a male professor publicly criticizes a student's neon-orange typed essay as 'vulgar packaging.' The embarrassed student, nicknamed Jordan, recalls two favored male classmates who receive informal deference from the professor. A copper-haired student, Sam, begins to sit beside Jordan, escorting her across campus and focusing their conversations on class matters while asserting scholarly authority. Jordan works multiple jobs to afford college and aspires to be a writer, but her advancement is contrasted with the privileges, mentorship, and social ease enjoyed by the male students, suggesting gendered academic entitlement and stalled opportunity.
Read at www.npr.org
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