‘Heavens’ a Disorienting Tale of Dreams and Reality

There’s a question that circulates sometimes in book circles about if and whether an author can or should be separated from the book, and whether the author’s intent for the work should be taken into consideration or if the work should be considered on its own merits. It’s a question I’ve been thinking about since finishing Sandra Newman’s The Heavens.

In the heady days of just-pre-9/11 New York, we start with a meet-cute among young adults who come from backgrounds not so rich they don’t have to worry about working but just affluent enough that they don’t have to worry about it very much. Ben meets Kate at a party hosted by a mutual friend, and is instantly drawn to her manic-pixie-dream-girl energy. (Okay, that’s enough hyphens for now.) Kate falls for Ben, too, and they quickly move in together as Ben works on his graduate degree and Kate finds the odd mural job here and there.

But Kate has a secret, which is that many nights, she dreams vividly of being Emilia, a sixteenth-century mistress to a nobleman who is convinced she has some important part to play in preventing the world from destruction. The choices she makes seem to have direct effects on Kate’s waking world—sometimes as small as her work having horses instead of bears; sometimes as big as cars still running on petroleum-based fuels. The butterfly effect of Emilia’s actions only seem to intensify the more she has to do with a poet and up-and-coming playwright Will, as in Shakespeare. In the sixteenth century, Emilia feels herself cracking under the pressure of saving the world from a threat she cannot see, while in the twenty-first century, Kate’s grasp on reality can’t keep up with how quickly it’s changing day by day, and always for the worse. As most of her friends, including Ben, come to believe she’s mentally ill, another friend has a far more frightening explanation.

For a book set pre-9/11 and about someone trying to avert disaster—and whose world keeps getting worse the harder she tries to fix it—I fully expected the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 to be a climactic event. Maybe it would even be thwarted by Kate’s—er, Emilia’s—successful efforts to stop this looming destruction. If you’ll forgive the spoiler, that’s not the case. In fact, the attacks affect everyone around Kate far more than they do this main character. It’s a bold choice, in a way, and I think it works for the story. A lot of things are working in The Heavens, but it feels like those things sometimes have to work hard to compensate for other elements in the book. The indulgent nature both romantically and financially was almost enough to make me put the book down, and I’m glad I pushed through the first fifth to where the plot started to pick up. But I do take issue with some elements.

In an interview with NPR, Newman says The Heavens can be looked at five different ways: as historical fiction, time-travel fantasy, political allegory, social realism, and a love story. This makes it sound like a dizzying narrative. It is a lush book, and inventive in its crossing streams of past and present. But it’s still fairly straightforward, which I mean as a compliment, even if that disappoints Newman. Emilia acts; Kate reacts to the new version of her world. Emilia navigates complex social systems; Kate’s friends think she’s lost her marbles. It’s sad, and it’s interesting, but it’s not complicated, and it’s not that complex. I don’t usually read reviews or interviews with authors after whatever led to a book being put on my TBR in the first place, and I wish I had stuck with that this time, because that sense of loftiness leaves a retroactive bad taste in my mouth. 

It was another note from Newman that has colored my view of the ending. There’s no purely spoiler-free way to describe it, so I will just say that things ended much differently, and bleaker, than expected. In the acknowledgements, Newman notes that the friend who loosely inspired Ben’s character died before the book was finished, and says that his death is the reason for the book’s darker tone at the end. In a way, this context has given me more grace for a finale that initially felt like a cop-out. Maybe the world didn’t end in the book, but a death is like a world ending, and I can cut Newman some slack for letting grief bleed onto the page—even if I think any number of other melancholy endings would have served the story better.

I don’t usually come down firmly on whether to separate work from worker, and if things can be taken in fully without context. Then again, it’s clear how much the author’s perception and, fine, intent have influenced the way I feel about the work itself. In the same way a butterfly’s wings can turn into a churning hurricane half a world away, a few words have made me rethink hundreds of pages of prose, and in this case, it’s impossible for me to separate the two.