An impactful coming of age story of tumultuous first love and the weight of life’s choices
From her excited days in Harvard University to her fatigued ones in medical school nine years later, Hearts and Bones is a dual-timeline coming of age story that meditates on mental health and the consequences of real-life choices.
The primary story in 1989 follows a young woman named Maya and how her sweet romance ventures into troubling waters as her boyfriend Peter’s fragile mental state take a turn for the worse. In the secondary story in 1998, Maya is a third-year medical school student, navigating exhausting shifts and the deteriorating health of her mother who suffers from severe dementia. This later storyline depicts the destination of Maya’s and Peter’s life journeys and how once strongly entwined lovers drift apart. The struggles of this older, more mature Maya foreshadow from the start the decisions and mistakes her younger self makes in her relationship with Peter and how the weight of life comes to bear on them both.
With Hearts and Bones, Lawrence D. Bub delivers a polished and well-rounded bildungsroman that touches upon several important topics. From institutional elitism, to sexist violence, to serious mental health issues and loss of loved ones, this novel doesn’t shy away from its at-times difficult subject matter. Even for those topics that aren’t given equal weight in the narrative—such as Maya’s sexual harassment at the hands of the entitled nepo-baby Conor—it reads as a natural, realistic bildungsroman; after all, we are rarely awarded definitive closure on anything in life.
In addition to this measured portrayal of mental illness, another key strength of Hearts and Bones is the complex relationship between Maya and Peter. At times sweet, sometimes strained, but always dynamic, the faithful portrayal of ups and downs of dating a person suffering from psychosis and depression forges a strong heart of the novel. While the rest of the cast is less dynamic compared to the two principal characters, they are colorful and compelling enough. From the creepy Conor, sexy and snobby Felix, and adorable wild-girl Olivia, to Maya’s deadbeat musician dad and loving mother Barbara, the cast makes the story expansive and well-rounded.
While both the 1989 and 1998 timelines are strong stories in their own right, the thematic connection between them seems like it could be missing. Peter’s bipolar disorder and Barbara’s dementia are neither explicitly connected in Barbara’s internal experiences nor implied through precise structuring. We are informed that Maya’s relationship with Peter and his psychiatric struggles influenced her choice of specialization in psychiatry, but we are not shown exactly what chain of events and Maya’s experiences lead to and from those points.
The overall trajectory of Peter’s struggles is likewise not structured in a way that lends itself to much dramatic tension. Peter has a crisis early on, it is half-resolved, Peter and Maya get back together for a while, and they then drift away; neither is motivated enough to put in the work needed to overcome the divergence of their goals in life. While this is a realistic, even naturalistic way human relationships develop and a good story about strong characters, it withholds the necessary connective tissue to fuse the stories together.
The positives do ultimately outweigh the pitfalls in the end. The emotional core of the story—Maya’s and Peter’s tumultuous romance and Maya’s relationship with her parents—is solid and retains the novel’s momentum. The story’s subject matter—mental health, messiness of adult relationships of all sorts, coming to terms with loss—is deftly handled and offers fresh perspectives without being heavy-handed.
Finding one’s bearings in life is a messy ordeal filled with regrets, loss, and seldom any closure, but it can also come with true connection and beauty. Hearts and Bones is a heartbreakingly authentic bildungsroman, portraying young love and mental health with an elegant, compassionate lens.
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