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REVIEW: A novel-length act of empathy

By Emily Grosvenor

Readers in eastern Iowa might recognize the world just outside their front doors in the vividly imagined Midwestern university town of author Stephen Lovely’s compelling debut novel Irreplaceable. Many of the book’s scenes — located in the university hospital, the New Prairie Co-op, at blues jam night at Calamity Jane’s, at Java Joe’s — will make some feel like they are reading about Iowa City, not the fictional town of Athens, Iowa.

The book’s homegrown setting is merely a comforting backdrop to a story so heartbreaking, courageous and funny that it reads like a single, novel-length act of empathy. Lovely, a longtime Iowa City resident, Writers Workshop alum and director of the Iowa Young Writers Studio, will read from his work at Prairie Lights Books at 7 p.m. Thursday. The reading will be webcast live on the Writing University web site.

Irreplaceable takes a single event — the accidental biking death of a young woman named Isabel and the donation of her heart to a dying stranger — and explodes it by six degrees, exploring the grief, guilt, joy, misery and redemption of the people touched and saved by the tragedy.

Irreplaceable is essentially about what happens after, and being a story built around its most dramatic plot development, it asks more questions than it answers. Who suffers most in the aftermath of tragedy? Where does our allegiance to the dead end? How do we best honor the dead? How do we move on?

At the center of the novel is Isabel’s beating heart — her living, pumping organ. Isabel’s heart may no longer be part of her, but it becomes many things to the characters in the book — a means to stay connected to the woman, lasting proof of her own selflessness, an impossibly precious gift and even proof of a killer’s humanity. How Isabel’s husband Alex, her mother Bernice and the heart’s recipient Janet view the heart reveal Lovely’s deep understanding of the many unexpected ways that people grieve.

This premise alone — taking a hot-button topic and creating soaring acts of empathy by entering the lives of the people who experience it — places Lovely in the tradition of T.C. Boyle and Jodi Picoult, writers who don't shirk from the subject of contemporary life.

Time may heal all wounds, but as the novel progresses, it is clear that the author’s empathy for his characters, and thus the reader’s, is actually growing with each scene. As Lovely moves among the characters in the book, from Isabel’s husband Alex to her mother Bernice, to Janet, the recipient of her heart, to the man who accidentally killed her, he lays bare the raw emotions lurking behind each of the characters’ brave facades.

Readers won’t be surprised to learn that the Lovely spent seven years working as a night clerk in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit of the University of Iowa Hospitals before writing this novel — he has clearly witnessed people experiencing unspeakable tragedy and has made the imaginative leap to explore that tragedy through fiction. But his ability to transcend the clinical details about heart transplants and organ donation make Irreplaceable an especially haunting human narrative.

As one character aptly states, there is no instruction manual for how people should act in the aftermath of organ donation, no rules of etiquette for the bereaved to interact with transplant recipients, no language of grief to forge connections between the people who have lost and gained through tragedies. Lovely’s book is a valiant effort to bridge that gap.