Complexities of the human heart

For those who may be wondering, the title Leah Hager Cohen has chosen for her second novel, “Heart, You Bully, You Punk,” comes from a poem by Marie Ponsot (reprinted at the book’s outset) portraying the heart as a wild, untrustworthy rogue with a tendency to run amok. But although the conflict between common sense and unruly passion is certainly a central theme, there is a great deal more to Cohen’s nuanced and penetrating examination of three modern New Yorkers unexpectedly besieged by love.

One winter day at school, 16-year-old Ann James, a promising student with a special flair for math, finds herself falling -- or leaping -- from the bleachers. She lands on her feet but breaks the bones in both heels. Her sudden impulse to sail through the air may or may not have something to do with the presence of an attractive male schoolmate. Ann’s math teacher, a brisk, no-nonsense woman who goes only by her surname, Esker, volunteers to tutor the injured Ann at home. There she meets Ann’s father, Wally, a pudgy, balding, warmhearted restaurateur.

Beneath her buttoned-down manner, Esker feels a certain affection for the girl, who shares her love of math. Ann, for her part, finds her unsentimental, ascetic teacher curiously “poignant”: “Poignant: profoundly moving, touching; also agreeably intense, stimulating; also keenly distressing, sharp; from poindre, to prick. Esker pricks. She is prickly.... Esker is poignant because (a) she always sits on the ottoman, (b) whenever she does break into a smile it’s always as though she’s lost a little internal struggle, (c) she whistles Beethoven’s Ninth while plotting parabolas.... This doesn’t exactly say it, but it’s the closest Ann can come to pinpointing it.”

Esker’s own experiences provide her with some insight into Ann. The only child of frail, faded parents, Esker grew up feeling herself to be too large and intense for the two-dimensional “construction paper” upstate New York town in which she lived: “She began to long, like a lovesick creature in a fairy tale, for some force greater than herself.... Much later, as a high school teacher, she would catch glimpses of similarly restive students ... like knightless squires seeking to pit themselves, solo and clueless, against what dragons they could find.” Ann urges her father to invite Esker to dinner to show their gratitude for her help. To their mutual surprise, Wally and Esker develop feelings for each other. But their tentative, quietly poignant love story is fraught with complications on many levels. Wally, whom Esker first assumes to be a widower, is still married to Ann’s mother, a lethally blithe and charming free spirit pursuing a career in the world of independent filmmaking who pops back home to visit her husband and daughter whenever it suits her:

“Alice is funny, Alice is warm. Alice is both at ease and glamorous. Alice is so happy to see them all -- the teacher, who gets thanked, with a solid handshake and a wide-open but rather easily dispensed smile, for doing so much for Ann (as if Alice knows, as if she keeps in regular contact); the husband, who gets asked about work in the most specific detail ... who gets a hair plucked from his sweater ... (as if she has a right to show him affection); and the daughter, of course, the daughter most of all, who barely deigns to meet the mother’s eye, who in her fury turns luminous and flickering, like a tissue paper lantern on a windy night, and who, during dessert, sits biting her water glass so hard it breaks. There is a snap and Ann says, ‘Oh,’ and they all look as she picks a piece of glass from her tongue....”

Cohen’s ability to understand her characters from the inside out is extraordinary, whether she is portraying Esker’s passion for math, Ann’s anxieties about her parents or Wally’s changing attitude toward his absentee wife. Cohen’s skill as a writer is equally remarkable: her gift for capturing her characters’ distinctive voices, her care in choosing precisely the right words, and her imaginative, but never strained, use of figurative language.

In general tenor, this bittersweet love story is not unlike a host of reasonably good contemporary novels focusing on personal relationships, and, indeed, it also suffers from some of the same fashionable tics and mannerisms: cutely hip teenagers; accidents fraught with psychological significance; and an ending that earnestly eschews neatness. But in her ability to create memorable characters, to probe deep below the surface, and to render the world she creates in language that makes it all come alive on the page, Cohen stands out from the crowd.