The Constant Heart

"Men are dogs—Maureen Dowd." This epigraph greets readers at the beginning of Nova's meditative, philosophical, and beautifully realized new novel about the nature of embattled American manhood. Nova (The Good Son; Tornado Alley) has built the novel around two very decent men—a father and his adult son, Jake—who share a deep emotional bond forged after Jake's mother leaves the family when he is a young boy. Both Jake and his father are deeply sympathetic characters, and Nova celebrates perhaps most fundamentally here the compassionate and honorable way they treat the women in their lives. Jake grows up to become a physicist, and discussions of Einstein's theory of relativity are interspersed throughout the novel, providing a fascinating thematic element related to the search for something constant in a world defined by change and instability. By the end of the novel, it becomes clear that the only constant available to us is "the constant heart" embodied by these two men.