Who hasn’t idly wondered what they might say to a long-lost first love? How to sum up that ineffable blend of exhilaration and heartbreak, gratitude and regret? At the opening of Lily King’s new novel, the narrator addresses a specific reader: “You knew I’d write a book about you someday.” This is not a story told to an anonymous audience, we learn, but an intimate remembrance directed at a singular friend from her youth. One of the many pleasures of this engaging novel is traveling along with the narrator into the white-hot center of her emotional and intellectual coming of age. 

King, who lives in Portland, has a talent for crafting independent women who grapple with love and ambition. Fans of her 2020 novel “Writers & Lovers” will have the satisfaction of recognizing key characters here.

“Heart the Lover’s” first section follows the narrator, an unnamed, aimless young college student, as she falls in with the two “smart guys in the class.” The young men, Sam and Yash, are precocious best friends living in the well-appointed house of a professor away on sabbatical. Any doubts that a professor might entrust 20-year-old undergraduates with his pristine grown-up home are brushed aside, simply because Sam and Yash are extraordinary: cultured, charming, and unabashedly brainy. They soon dub our narrator “Jordan,” after Jordan Baker, the confident flapper and professional golfer who is Nick Carraway’s passing romantic interest in “The Great Gatsby.” Jordan, who lives in a chilly rental flat with numerous roommates, is at first as dazzled by their central heating as she is by their academic ambitions.

King has an abiding interest in exploring how smart, gifted women navigate male-dominated worlds. In a standout, funny scene in “Writers & Lovers,” an aspiring writer, Casey, and her future love interest compare the author photos of male and female writers. Women try to look friendly and nonthreatening, they note, while the men have leeway to scowl and brood. Jordan may need a few more years under her belt before she notices such subtleties, but she’s highly attuned to the privileges accorded to these young men: 

“I’m a good student in English. I get A’s and A-’s and nice words at the bottom of my essays. But I’ve never made friends with any of my professors … No one has ever given me a perk or suggested a seminar.” Recalling that a drunken professor had once hit on her while she was waiting tables, she wryly observes, “If I’d had Dr. Gastrell, maybe I’d have gotten to see his green bedroom, but I doubt he’d have given me his house for the year for nothing.” 

Sam and Yash dwell in a vastly different world of honors classes: “It really is like they go to different schools,” Jordan says. This, too, adds to their allure. She covets their thrill in learning and decides to take her own potential seriously, adjusting her course load accordingly. Of course, that’s not all she covets. It’s to King’s credit that the emerging love triangle and sexual awakening feel authentic and fresh — anchored in Jordan’s keen voice, the story clips along:

“I walk across campus a little lightheaded. I keep bursting out laughing, thinking about making out on Doc Gastric’s couch on a Monday in broad daylight. All the awkwardness dissolved when we were kissing. He said little things and I said little things and we made each other laugh on that striped couch.” 

Sam and Yash are so close, the reader may be forgiven for wondering whether there’s a subterranean attraction at the root of their devotion (though Jordan never seems to). The love triangle plays out in a familiar way. Jordan falls first for Sam, a conflicted Baptist who does his imperfect best to maintain chastity until marriage. As seeds of discontent emerge in that relationship, she feels pulled toward the charismatic, tormented Yash. 

Writing Jordan’s story in present tense brings a vivid, fast-moving cinematic energy. For the most part, King reveals her perspective with impressive technical mastery, keeping readers closely engaged right alongside her. Occasionally this choice delivers flatness, immediacy without an intermediary to interpret or lend nuance. 

After Sam and Jordan break up and her love affair with Yash begins, the intrigue deepens. Though Sam now lives elsewhere, Yash fears angering him: 

“Every few weeks Sam comes to town and disturbs (our) happiness. He stays with Yash and I can’t go to any of the parties they go to. My name is verboten. When they are together, I don’t exist, Yash tells me.”  

Though she’s hurt, this is an erasure that the 20-year-old Jordan cannot and does not unpack in real time. At this point, I grew hungry for the insights of an older, retrospective narrator. King is too smart a writer not to anticipate this, even winking at it as Jordan makes a pivotal decision to study abroad: “I think about how Dr. Felske is always talking about the two things that bring perspective and revelation to a character: time and distance.” 

Adeptly, before the reader wearies of avid but blinkered first love, the novel leaps forward 20 years. In its second part, Jordan is happily married and parenting two young boys in Portland. She’s a successful writer, and Yash visits on his way through town, provoking Jordan’s confusion and curiosity. At the heart of her tension is a secret — what does he know or suspect about the repercussions of their long-ago breakup? Jordan ponders “life’s tricks, the ones we see, the ones we don’t,” and the two play a cagey game of feints and bluffs, echoes of the card game they’d once played as students (the game that gives the novel its title). 

In the third and final movement, the long arcs of these attachments gain a sweeping power — and King delivers the wisdom that time and distance can offer. Another seven years have passed, and the daily pressures of parenting and career have taken a toll. Jordan’s youngest son, now age 12, has a worrisome health condition and is awaiting surgery. Nevertheless, when one of her old friends calls to let her know that the other is dying of cancer, she gets on a plane to go say goodbye: 

“On the other side of the room the (medical) residents strain to stay focused. They flex their jaw muscles, shift their weight. Their eyes travel around the room but never to our faces. I study theirs, one at a time. I wonder what dramas have played out among them. I can feel their youth in the room, a forcefield of energy and fear and longing and confusion. I can feel it so strongly. And I know they sense nothing about us, two men and a woman in our late forties, none of our old entanglements or the freakishness of the three of us being in this room together now.”

A hospital finale sounds like the setup for a tear-jerker, but King is not ham-fisted. The section is gripping, unrushed, and richly layered; characters from Jordan’s past converge with a wide swath of feeling, ranging from grief to gallows humor, from pique to gratitude. The loss of old friends and the vulnerabilities inherent in love and parenting offer deeply satisfying revelations in the hands of our older, wiser narrator. 

It’s usually a mistake to judge a book by its cover, and “Heart the Lover” is no exception. Publishers seem to think our attention-starved times demand blaring, gaudy colors (note to designers: enough already with the Day-Glo pink and orange). But King’s novel doesn’t need a flashy package — through the sheer power of storytelling, she holds readers until the very end.

Genanne Walsh is the author of a novel, “Twister,” and a creative nonfiction chapbook, “Eggs in Purgatory.” She lives in Portland.