The reputation of the Canadian writer Sheila Heti, who came to prominence amid the reality-hungry vogue of the last decade, rests largely on a pair of candid comic novels mingling philosophy, performance art and self-help. In 2013’s How Should a Person Be?, a divorced playwright, Sheila, is kept from her work by an alarmingly submissive sexual liaison; in Motherhood, from 2018, the Heti-adjacent narrator, nearing 40 in a long-term relationship, doesn’t want kids (“I don’t care about passing on my genes! Can’t one pass on one’s genes through art?”). In both books, an ambling narrative drew a measure of urgency from a dilemma that turns on stubbornly cleft logic: to be a writer, or a lover? Make art, or a baby?
More either/ors drive Heti’s brazenly strange new novel, less openly autobiographical than her past work. It follows Mira, a young female student infatuated with a standoffish peer, Annie, whose eye Mira is busily out to catch when her father dies, unleashing a psychodrama of regret that she didn’t spend more time with him. The stuff of a normal, if momentous, rite-of-passage tale, you might think, except that these events unspool retrospectively from the vantage point of an imminent apocalypse as God contemplates a “second draft” of creation, and that’s just for starters. Mira’s cohort, living in a kind of bizarro version of Toronto, are all in training to become art critics, a uniquely sought-after occupation (one of the novel’s many hard-to-parse jokes), and everyone in the book is said to resemble a bird, fish, or bear, a strict taxonomy conferring pivotal personality traits. And halfway through the novel, Mira finds herself trapped inside a leaf, talking to her father, thanks to the transmigration of souls…
Getting the measure of all this is like trying to weigh a gas. Initially the narration seems whimsical and fey, caught between cosmic musing in a lofty first-person plural and the fable-like timbre of Mira’s story, although Heti’s metaphorical range keeps you on your toes, to say the least: when Mira first meets Annie, we’re told their horizons widen “like a vagina… stretching for a very large cock”, and when her father dies, she feels “his spirit ejaculate into her, like it was the entire universe coming into her body, then spreading all the way through her, the way cum feels spreading inside, that warm and tangy feeling”.
Still, I was losing faith that Heti had any kind of purpose in sight by the time the leaf business came along to put a welcome rocket up all the meandering drollery, allowing the novel to work an impressive spectrum of meaning and feeling, both abstract and tangible, solemn as well as silly, hitting notes that recall Ovid, Kafka and, oddly, the climax of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. The wacky metaphysics generate a what-if? comedy that gains voltage from Heti’s refusal to milk it for allegory, as grieving Mira, shut off from humanity, tries to signal to Annie as she passes her tree in the company of another woman.
You might see Pure Colour as the last in a tragicomic trilogy of fretful overthinking: after sex and potential procreation, now comes mortality and the fate of childhood. Puberty, here, is provocatively figured as betrayal (“the body becomes a grown-up and it cannot turn back”), an opening salvo in a ceaseless push-pull of filial obligation and independence. Freedom, previously a Heti watchword, in this book tastes of guilt, not least when Mira wonders why it was only when her father lay dying that she felt free to embrace him.
Heti’s questing idiosyncrasy means there’s little time for any of this to get treacly. “In the next draft of existence, everyone will love everyone, and they will consider our lives and think with a shudder, Until they pushed a person out of their dirtiest parts, they had no one they could truly love, and no one who could truly love them – except for their own parents, who also pushed them out of their dirtiest parts.” How about that for another crack at outlining the ambivalence behind Motherhood? And amid the weirdness, it’s also very funny: we’re told that the reason we lose touch with what’s cool, the older we get, is that God “doesn’t want the criticism of the most dynamic parts of culture coming from someone in the middle of life… God doesn’t care what you think about a band.”
At one point, we’re told that Mira doesn’t know “why she spent so much of her life… looking at websites, when just outside the window there was a sky”. The ensuing riff earns a bittersweet laugh, but the thought nags: why not both? Online and outside, sex and writing, art and a baby? Yet while Heti’s binary-mania isn’t always persuasive, this one-of-a-kind novel, curious in two senses, still feels nothing less than vital, even if only because, in tackling the bond between the living and the dead, she now has the mother of all either/ors on her hands.
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti is published by Harvill Secker (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
