Lily King’s two Casey Peabody novels, Writers & Lovers (2020) and the very recent Heart the Lover (2025) take this jaggedness seriously rather than treating it as a failure of will. Read together, the novels make an argument easy to mistake for one about literary ambition and a life committed to making art. While ostensibly about relationships and love, the novels are really about grief’s permission structure. In my experience, grief deflates our gladness and saps more of our agency than we realize.

In rendering Casey Peabody [SPOILER ALERT!], King has given us a protagonist for whom almost nothing in her life is something she has chosen. Her mother dies suddenly on a trip to South America under circumstances that remain only partly understood. Her father, earlier in her life, lost his high school coaching job after he was caught looking through a peephole at teenage girls in a locker room. Casey and her brother Caleb drift through Writers & Lovers in a semi-fugue state, unable to reconcile with the family that dissolved. The only act left available to them is the refusal to make any further choice. The not-choosing seems to be the closest thing to agency a mind broken by a death it couldn't prevent can manage.

Crucially for Casey, inside that drift, there is the writing: six pages a day kept up for six years on a single novel, done in the morning hours before her restaurant shift. By coincidence or design or synchronicity, both novels place passages I kept returning to at pages 80-81. In Writers & Lovers, Casey describes the practice itself: “The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane.” The line sits on the page facing the news of Princess Diana’s death—public grief on one side, private discipline on the other—and it gives the defended-corner argument in Casey’s own words. King has said in a 2020 Dead Darlings interview that Writers & Lovers poured out of her after her mother’s death, when she had been unable to write anything for a long time. Of course, this is essentially what the writing is for Casey too: not a triumph of will but the one practice that survives the unmaking.

Lily King, Writers & Lovers (Grove Press, 2020), pp. 80-81. Excerpt reproduced for purposes of literary commentary. Photograph by the author.

The mirroring page 80-81 in Heart the Lover shows Casey doing what a writer does, which is to see. Yash, back on campus, has come to find Jordan (a nickname given to her by Sam and Yash), and they have a conversation about reading each other’s work. She tells him his story was gorgeous and tender, that the writer in it “sort of reminded me of” him. He dismisses it as maudlin and overwritten, then hands her a paperback of Knut Hamsun's Hunger and tells her it is “about being a writer, no matter the cost.” She holds back the deeper thing she sees in him, because what she sees is him, and the words won’t come. He gives her the framing for the vocation they are both already practicing. He does not quite give her himself.

Lily King, Heart the Lover (Grove Press, 2025), pp. 80-81. Excerpt reproduced for purposes of literary commentary. Photograph by the author.

While Casey manages to claw out a space for her writing within the drift, the drift’s seems to overwhelm nearly every relationship Casey is in. Paco, Luke, Oscar, Silas, Sam, Yash—the six men across two novels set the romantic rhythms Casey lives by. Around them a wider weather of relationships she inhabits rather than chooses: the landlord whose apartment she takes because it is offered, the kitchen staff whose orbit she joins because the job is there. She follows Paco to Spain on something close to a whim, uprooting her whole life on the gravity of one man's pull. As the older Casey in Writers & Lovers, she dates Oscar and Silas in parallel, drifting between them as circumstances (joining an already formed family versus building one), rather than her own desires seem to decide. As a college senior in Heart the Lover, she is pulled into Sam and Yash’s orbit, loses Sam to a breakup, and is then crushed when Yash, on the eve of their planned move to New York together, chooses his loyalty to Sam over his love for her. Maureen Corrigan, reviewing Heart the Lover for NPR, observed that the Yash wound is the engine of the older Casey's arrested development, another grief inside the larger one—and the formulation extends past Yash to all of them.

What grief has done to Casey is more particular than the deflation of agency in the abstract. The wounds at the center of her life are wounds of regard—a mother who could no longer hold her in mind because she was dead, a father whose attention turned out to have been the wrong kind all along. What Casey lost was the experience of being chosen, chosen to be looked after, chosen to be seen rightly. The posture she takes toward the men is not passivity. It is the specific shape of waiting to be chosen again, because to choose first would require trusting she could survive choosing wrong. [The latter is why, I think, King’s novels land so powerfully on the reader. Unless you’re hermetically sealed off from the world, every reader can relate to the notion of how fear drives us away from making a choice.]

The first crack in this pattern comes late in Writers & Lovers, when Oscar returns from a work trip in a foul mood and expects Casey to absorb it—after caring for his boys for the weekend, no less. She refuses, leaves the house, and does not go back. The refusal is small in the scale of a life, but it is the first time she declines to organize herself around a man’s weather. Everything that follows in Heart the Lover later is built on the ground this exit clears.

Charting Casey’s arc across the two novels, King manages to do something quite bold in that she takes a rather conventional climax setting (a deathbed plot) and turns it on its head. The hospital room in Heart the Lover makes the climax possible rather than being the climax itself. Yash is dying and Sam is keeping vigil when Casey goes to them, and what she is given there is the chance to do for Yash what she was unable to do for her mother years earlier. She’s present at the ending rather than receiving its aftermath from a distance. The agency she was denied at the central wound of her life is partly returned to her here, in the smaller form of choosing presence at someone else’s wound. It isn’t redemption, since Yash still dies and her mother is still gone, but being there is something Casey chose for herself, and the choosing is what opens the door to the final moment of the book.

The deathbed scene also sharpens what the writing has been arguing all along, giving Casey the comparison she didn’t know she was making. Sam and Yash are the brilliant boys whose essays the professors read aloud, and everyone assumes they will be the writers. By middle age, it is Casey who has become the writer and the brilliant boys who have not. The hard life of writing doesn’t yield to kindness; it tends to find the people already practiced at keeping going—even inside loss.

After everything the two novels have piled up against this moment, Casey is finally and completely seen. Silas in that closing moment is at once the partner she has built a life with and the father she never had, present and generous and capable of recognizing exactly who she is, and the wound that began with her own father is met, in this last image of the book, by a man inhabiting both roles at once. This is what the agency King has been tracking has been moving toward all along: not Casey directing her own life, not even Casey choosing presence at someone else's ending, but Casey at last being witnesses by another.

What King refuses, in both novels, is the rationalization—the consolation that grief makes Casey stronger, the argument that loss is a teacher. The novels are not scaling the tired mountain of personal resilience and grit, which I admire. What they do instead is leave something in the reader, a residue that allows us to look at the hard moments of our own lives. The line I opened this essay with—that grief deflates our gladness and saps more of our agency than we realize—is not a claim I came to King to argue. It is something her writing made visible to me about my own. The deepest subject here, as Mary Kate Carr observed in her AV Club review, is what it means to be known by another at a particular moment of your life, and being known is itself one of the small choices grief still permits—alongside the morning hour at the desk, the trip to the hospital room, the willingness to be loved at last by someone who can show up.

Epilogue

The butterflies on the summer breeze

The wildflowers sway with ease

At the bridge of two infinities

What’s been lost and what lies waiting

— Big Thief, “Double Infinity” (2025)

Big Thief’s ‘Double Infinity’ was in my ears while I was drafting. The bridge image kept rhyming with what I found in King’s novels.

Author’s Note: I am not paid by or affiliated with Politics & Prose. They’re just my local bookstore.

The “Ninth Hour” in the Catholic canonical hours is ‘None’ (pronounced noh-neh) prayed at 3 PM and historically associated with the death of Christ.

Let me take a step back here to say that obviously Alice McDermott is a living legend and among the giants of precisely rendered fiction. Across her work, the reader finds that she often holds a moral life in suspension rather than resolving it. You see it in Charming Billy (1998), After This (2006), and Absolution (2023).

The move most writers don’t make

Withholding judgment is a familiar craft virtue, the workshop cliché of don’t judge your characters. But that is usually a rule about the narrator’s stance. What McDermott does is different and more difficult. She has this uncanny knack for navigating her characters’ own ongoing negotiation with the past—the act of turning the same events over, finding new meanings, suspending verdicts they thought they had reached. Yet the judgment that gets withheld is not McDermott’s about her characters. It is the characters’ about themselves and each other.

That is a rarer move, and it is closer [at least as I’ve tried and often failed to reflect in my own life] to how consciousness actually works. A lot of fiction gives characters interior monologues that build and build and build until they reach a conclusion. The character thinks something through, inveighs to themselves, then arrives somewhere. The ol’ well-trodden path of the epiphany structure, even in novels that claim to resist it. In The Ninth Hour, McDermott’s characters think their way toward understandings and then keep thinking, and the understanding gets revised, softened, complicated, sometimes abandoned. Sally’s feelings about her mother’s marriage. Annie’s about Jim. The nuns about each other. She manages to keep readers in this liminal space because we recognize it in our own lives—even if we aren’t always honest to ourselves. In The Ninth Hour nothing settles, because in real life nothing does.

The craft mechanisms are worth naming. In The Ninth Hour, McDermott does it in three specific ways:

• Time as solvent [which sounds fancy and academic but is really just how memory works]. The collective narrator, looking back across decades, makes every judgment provisional. The reader knows more time will pass, more context will arrive, and what feels like a conclusion now will look different from the other side of another death, another child, another decade.

• Sympathy that outlasts context. McDermott gives the reader reasons to judge. The novel opens with Jim’s suicide preparations. Then there’s Annie’s hidden longing for intimacy, written in scenes that make the reader flinch with her. Mrs. Costello’s manipulations. Sister Jeanne’s final act. Sally on the train to Chicago, intent on her vocation, gulled and disgusted and then cruel herself when the girl in the next seat plays her for money. McDermott keeps rendering these characters with a tenderness the information does not license.

• Revised memory. Characters return to the same events and remember them differently. Not unreliably in any gotcha sense, but in the way that memory works, where what you notice in a scene changes based on what has happened since. [I keep trying to do this in my own work and find it’s difficult to stick the landing without being heavy handed.]

To achieve this, she makes a structural choice that carries the novel forward from the central wound of the family rather than backward toward it. Most literary novels about family trauma are archaeological. They move backward through time. Something happened before the book began, a death, a betrayal, a buried secret, and the narrative is the slow approach to it. The reader arrives at the wound alongside the protagonist, and the arrival is the climax. We have so many novels in this shape that we have stopped noticing it is a shape.

The structural refusal

The Ninth Hour opens with the character of Jim closing the windows, sealing the door with rags, turning on the gas. His pregnant wife Annie is out. She comes home to the smell. A neighbor runs for help and a nun arrives. By the end of the first chapter we know what happened and why, and the rest of the novel, three generations and several decades and a dozen lives, unfolds forward from this scene rather than back toward it. This is obviously a big structural choice and it changes everything the novel can do.

Archaeological novels have to land a verdict. Of course, that is what the approach to the buried thing is for. By the time the protagonist reaches the wound, the novel has arranged its material so that the meaning(s) becomes clear. The father was cruel, the mother was complicit, the child survived, and now we understand. Understanding is the reward for the excavation.

The Ninth Hour cannot deliver this, because you cannot reach a verdict on a story that keeps going. Annie remarries. Sally is born, grows up, considers the convent, turns away. The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor tend the dying. Sister Jeanne, near the end, does a thing you could call sin or you could call mercy. And McDermott does not tell you which, because the grandchildren who narrate the book are still alive and still thinking about it. Yeah. I know. She’s doing something wild and magical here. Every judgment the novel seems to reach is revised by the next chapter, the next generation, the next death. Time keeps passing, meaning keeps moving. It is the moral texture the forward structure makes possible.

If you’re reaching for this book for the first time, watch closely how she handles Jim. The opening chapter gives you every reason to judge him. A young husband, a pregnant wife, a selfish and devastating act. The novel could have positioned him as the wound the family approaches and understands. Instead McDermott keeps rendering Jim, across years and perspectives, with a tenderness the information does not license. Annie’s memory of him softens and hardens and softens again. Sally, who never met her father, inherits a version of him that is not quite her mother’s. The nuns, who cleaned the apartment, carry their own. No single Jim emerges. The reader is not permitted the comfort of a settled view. The grandchildren serve as the collective narrator for The Ninth Hour, acting as an instrument of the unsettled point of view. The voice McDermott uses is both far enough from the events to see around them and close enough to the family to keep caring. And this voice refuses to stop revising into the future.

The Ninth Hour has stayed with me long after I finished it—the echo of that voice and arc of each character lodged into my skin like the best kind of splinter.

My notes in the margin and notebook were copious and thorough. McDermott shows how a moral life actually works—not through a series of verdicts that are reached and filed away—but as an ongoing negotiation with people who are no longer here and a past that cannot be changed. The understanding I reached at forty-two looks different than twenty-two, not because I have learned the absolute truth about the world but because I’ve lived more. But no one names this as it happens. No one wakes up on Thursday morning, sits down with a cup of coffee and a their leather-bound journal, and writes, “I noticed that the way I felt about my mother at Sunday dinner at 6:47 PM, when she asked if I felt SO RESTED because the kids slept over at friends' houses, is no longer the way I feel about her now, here, at 5:13 AM on Thursday, three days and fourteen-odd hours later. This represents a meaningful evolution in my filial consciousness.” We just keep going. The revision happens anyway—for better or worse.

Through time, most likely, we just find ourselves holding someone differently than we used to, and, sometimes, we are mildly surprised by our own thoughts. The story keeps traveling. What McDermott does so skillfully is execute this revision of her characters’ lives without letting her characters narrate it. As such, the grandchildren see what Annie cannot. The novel names what living does not. Her refusal to resolve is not a failure. She’s [I think anyway] just being honest about how time works and how people actually are.

The last chapter of The Ninth Hour is narrated by the grandchildren, looking back. They are still not finished. And they will not be finished. The family keeps going, which means the wound keeps traveling on and on and on, which means none of us get a final judgment on anyone, including themselves. The novel ends but the thinking does not. It is the ending. The Ninth Hour makes its argument by getting out of its own way and letting time do the work.

Author’s Note: I am not paid by or affiliated with Politics & Prose. They’re just my local bookstore.

For the uninitiated of Vigil, Jill “Doll” Blaine descends toward K.J. Boone’s deathbed in her favorite black pumps, reconstituting limb by limb as she falls. She has been “elevated” and sent, decades after her own death by car bomb, to comfort the dying. Boone, her current charge, is an oil tycoon who knowingly poisoned the planet for fifty years and who, dying, has nothing to apologize for. Beside her at the bedside is the Frenchman, who invented the engine and has come to repent it, and who insists Boone be made to repent before any comfort is offered. Read quickly, Jill and the Frenchman look like opposites: she dispenses unconditional grace, he demands moral reckoning. Saunders himself, in interviews around Vigil’s launch, has wondered aloud who is right.

But neither of them are doing what they appear to be doing [SPOILER ALERT!]. The Frenchman has collapsed the contradiction toward moral binary: comfort must be earned. Jill has collapsed it the other direction: comfort must be given regardless. They have picked opposite sides of the same refusal. Jill’s ending—setting off for the next vigil, the human memories tucked underneath the elevated self as fuel rather than held in tension with it—is not synthesis. For her, it becomes an infinity loop. She has chosen and the choosing is the closure. The contradiction the novel wants held—that Boone is both monstrous and a man, that comfort is both warranted and obscene—is held by neither of them. Saunders refuses to redeem Boone for our comfort, not because he’s withholding, but because the unredeemed Boone is, of course, the thing he wants to think about with us.

The pressure of the novel lands on Boone and Saunders builds him with unsettling care. He is not a cartoon. He was a Midwestern farm boy who loved his wife, who raised a daughter who turned out caring and well-adjusted and who sits at his bedside in his final hours. He believes [actually believes; just like the current U.S. Secretary of Energy, someone whom I briefed a few times but that’s a story for another time] that the energy his company pulled from the ground lifted billions out of poverty and that the world is better for his having lived in it. He is also a man who knew, by the 1980s, what carbon emissions were doing atmosphere, and who spent the next forty years funding the lie. Saunders gives us both Boones in the same prose. Boone’s daughter is not a redemption. She does not undo the decades of deceit, but she is not nothing, either. She rearranges the pillow behind his head with the unembarrassed familiarity of a daughter who has done it many times before. Whatever Boone was outside this room, in this room he was a father who had taught a child how to love him without flinching. Something in him was capable of producing her. The reader is asked to do neither and both: to keep both Boones in view at once and to refuse the relief of choosing.

What makes Boone exceptional in Saunders’ catalog is that the loving husband and the well-adjusted daughter aren’t quite enough. They don’t soften the man, nor do they redeem him. But it does make the reader pause. Boone represents an evil so clear and obvious that he is worthy of our anger, and Saunders knows it. In a February 2026 conversation with Ezra Klein, an episode titled, tellingly, “George Saunders on Anger, Ambition and Sin”, Saunders described Jill’s compassion-for-everyone framework as one he largely shared going into the novel, but admitted he got more and more skeptical about it as he examined it. Saunders’ creation of Boone seems to have broken something in the formula. Saunders said he went into Vigil ready to extend his usual generosity to a flawed character. Yet he found in Boone an evil that his generosity could not absorb. The Frenchman, for all his hardness, is right that the anger is real and earned. Jill, for all her sweetness, is wrong to dispense comfort that displaces it. The reader is asked to hold both: the anger Saunders himself could not write past and the human being he refuses to reduce to that anger.

Saunders works skillfully in compression that accumulates and accelerates. Take a single sentence on pp. 172 in Vigil where he renders two characters and two contradictions at once. Jill, seeking a fresh beginning, hurls herself toward Paul Bowman—the man who killed her—and finds him “luminous, spectral, celestial, the size of a mountain, seated at that same (football field–sized) metal table, nervously smoking.” From the page, we understand this isn’t the first time she’s done this. The sentence is doing two characters at once. Jill has rendered her killer cosmic because she cannot approach him at human scale; her elevation-system is a coping mechanism dressed as enlightenment (photo from pp. 172-173 below).

George Saunders, Vigil (New York: Random House, 2026), 172–173. Excerpt reproduced for purposes of literary commentary. Photograph by the author.

But Bowman is also there inside the prose. He is still, eternally, the man who needs a cigarette, unable to settle into the transcendence Jill is imposing on him. Jill collapses the contradiction toward elevation: he must be cosmic so I can approach him. Bowman collapses it toward the human: I am still the man at the table. They meet in a single breath and the reader feels both collapses simultaneously.

This is the kind of architecture Saunders has been building since he launched his career. Take “Al Roosten” from Tenth of December, which is perhaps my favorite Saunders story ever. [He just totally nails the characters + scene. The humor is so absurd. I still remember how much my whole body hurt after I read it in The New Yorker back in 2009.] In the story, Al kicks Larry Donfrey’s [an incredible name] wallet and car keys under the bleachers in a fit of envy and walks away. He considers himself, if not quite a hero, then at least a man who has been wronged and is owed something.

The premise runs through the entirety of the collection, including the title track, “Tenth of December”. Don Eber, walking into the woods to die before his illness takes his mind, has constructed an entire moral architecture around his choice. He wants to spare his family, exit on his terms, keep his dignity. Robin, the boy who falls through the ice, ruins it. Eber must come back, must be saved, must keep the body and the mind he was trying to spare everyone. The story refuses to tell us whether his decision to die was right or wrong, whether the rescue is grace or postponement. It holds both. The compassion that gets attributed to Saunders’ treatment of his characters is also, and maybe more fundamentally, a compassion for the reader he is asking to hold what the characters cannot.

The political register sharpens in Liberation Day’s “Love Letter,” where a grandfather writes to his grandson explaining why he and his generation did not act as democracy eroded around them. The letter is the contradiction made textual. He is composing his own moral self-portrait while the gaps in the portrait remain visible to everyone but him. The things he didn’t say, the meetings he didn’t attend, the small accommodations that became, in aggregate, the absence of resistance. He cannot quite see what he failed to do, and cannot quite not see it, and so the letter has to keep going. Stopping would mean acknowledging what the letter is actually for. Where Al Roosten kicks the keys and walks away mid-rationalization, the grandfather writes the rationalization onto the page in real time, and the prose forces the reader to hold both the man he is telling his grandson he is and the man the letter reveals. The grandfather is the necessary counterpart to Boone. Boone knew about the impact of carbon emissions and lied; the grandfather knew about democracy and did not act. One is the active agent of a knowable harm, the other its passive enabler. The contradiction the reader is asked to hold across both figures is the same: that knowing is not innocence, that the architecture of self-justification is itself a kind of harm, and that compassion for the man does not absolve the man.

Lincoln in the Bardo is the formal articulation that connects all of this. The bardo dwellers: Vollman with his unconsummated marriage, Bevins with his slit wrists, the reverend with his terror. Each refuse to know they are dead. Each has picked a side of their own contradiction and built an afterlife around the refusal. The chorus of voices, the absence of a single integrating narrator, the bardo as structure rather than mere setting—is the refusal of resolution. Vigil inherits that form, but tightens the moral stakes by making the unresolved figure actively guilty rather than tragically grieving.

What changes between the two is not the move, but rather the figure being held. Lincoln in the Bardo gives us a grieving father and a chorus of the dead, all of them holding contradictions about loss. Lincoln cannot let his son go; the bardo dwellers cannot accept that they themselves are gone. The novel’s moral atmosphere is sorrow, the radical cosmic tenderness that Saunders is so good at effectuating for the reader. Vigil narrows that chorus to two voices arguing across a single bed and replaces the grieving father with a guilty one. The contradiction the reader is asked to hold is no longer “how do we go on after loss” but “what do we owe a man who caused loss and feels nothing.” The scale changes to: Willie Lincoln’s typhoid is intimate and tragic; Boone’s lying about damage from carbon emissions is structural and ongoing and the harm has not stopped at his deathbed. Sorrow is no longer the governing register. Anger is in the room. The form has tightened from an orchestra into a chamber piece. To raise the stakes, the question has tightened from whether grief can be metabolized to whether anger can coexist with seeing the man whole. Saunders is doing the same move, but in harder material. He’s admitting into the work an emotional register that he sometimes kept at arm’s length.

There is a discomfort to all of this. Saunders does not let the reader settle. We cannot dismiss Boone. The daughter is there, the farm boy is there, the love for his wife is there. We cannot absolve him. The lying is there, the forty years are there, the burning planet remains. We cannot let go of the anger he has earned and we cannot let the anger be all we feel. We cannot side with the Frenchman without becoming his hardness, and we cannot side with Jill without accepting her loop. Every escape route the story offers turns out to be another collapse of the contradiction it has asked us to hold.

What I think that stuckness produces, if we stay inside it, is a kind of forced widening. We have to imagine further than we wanted to. We have to extend ourselves toward Boone—not to forgive him, but to see him—and the extension is the work. Saunders’ compassion is not a posture he models for us. It is a muscle he develops in us by refusing every easier alternative.

P.S. If you aren’t subscribed to Story Club, you should be. George has built one of the rare genuinely kind, genuinely curious reading communities online, and his generosity with his own experience and craft and engagement with his readers is the engine of it. I’m grateful for every post.

Author’s Note: I am not paid by or affiliated with Politics & Prose. They’re just my local bookstore.