AJapanese folktale concerns a young acolyte so obsessed with drawing cats that the elderly and perplexed head priest sends him away. In time, he finds shelter in an abandoned temple that, unbeknownst to him, is haunted. But he has ink. He draws cats all over the walls, the beams, and the floors. Tiring, he tucks himself into a closet to sleep, but wakes to the sounds of violent struggle. When the temple falls silent, he creeps out. The mangled body of a giant goblin rat lies on the ground. From the walls, the beams, and the floors, his cats look on, their mouths bright with blood.
What writer does not dream of her work rising up to protect her? What writer does not, at some point, endure the opposite—the awful vulnerability of her words in the world, and her inability to defend them from being misread, even mutilated, by those goblin rats of malice, envy, laziness, mere incomprehension?
The case of Sheila Heti is a curious one. Her novels “How Should a Person Be?” and “Motherhood” won her a wide readership, feverish admiration, and some aggrieved chiding—much of it born out of a blurry understanding of her work and even of what it means to read and assess fiction. The narrator of “How Should a Person Be?” (2010), a stalled writer navigating friendship, sex, and art within an insular circle of friends, was often deemed unlikable, childish, implausible, or some vexing chimera of the three. Two headlines—“Grow Up, Sheila Heti!” and “Sheila Heti Gets Sex Wrong”—still burn in my brain. “Motherhood” (2018) was also taken as a sociological artifact, judged for how realistic its portrayal of a woman’s feelings about bearing children was considered to be (“realistic” being code for “relatable”). Critics groused that Heti hadn’t drawn enough from other perspectives, that she hadn’t discussed motherhood in sufficiently political terms, carping whenever her character’s views on motherhood diverged from theirs. Never mind fiction’s prerogative to ruffle rather than reassure the reader. Heti’s penchant for wrestling with abstract questions and delivering equally abstract answers left plenty of room for critics to scamper in with prescriptions of their own.
“How Should a Person Be?” was compared with Lena Dunham’s “Girls”; “Motherhood” was appraised as part of a slew of popular books on the subject. Often lost from view was everything that made Heti’s work distinctive, not least its brambly formal experimentalism, its moments of whimsical self-consciousness, reminiscent of the early McSweeney’s and The Believer (where Heti had been the interviews editor), and its preoccupation with mysticism, questions of faith, and ethics. Nathan Goldman, one of the few critics to delve into the lineage and form of Heti’s books, situated them in “a Jewish textual tradition, dating back to the Talmud, of blending genres and modes in the service of unceasing inquiry in which the metaphysical and the mundane are inseparably interwoven.”
Heti, too, has spoken of her novels in such terms, describing herself as a Jewish writer in her interest in “the circling, the self-doubt, the self as a clown of failed intentions, the recognition of the failure of the intellect to solve anything.” Look closely at “How Should a Person Be?” and you see an explicitly Biblical structure, broken into acts and featuring a protagonist, named Sheila, who describes herself as a failed Moses, striving to solve the question of how to live but remaining empty-handed, turning up no particular commandments. “I had the idea that Sheila and her friends are wandering in the desert, because this is the generation that doesn’t reach the Promised Land,” Heti has said. “Motherhood,” another wandering drama of self-doubt characterized by obsessive whorls of thought, is etched with don’t-touch-my-chains Kafkaesque humor. That provoking spirit, that restlessness, that greed for difficulty suffuses her work, along with the weaving and unweaving of arguments. “How Should a Person Be?” was, in fact, heavily revised between its Canadian and American publications. “It’s about not really knowing the answers,” Heti later remarked, “and it’s probably right for this book to never be done.”
Her new novel, “Pure Colour” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), has been written as if to foreclose literal-minded misapprehension. It is an explicitly mystical book about the creation of art and the creation of the universe, about the death of a father and the death of ego, about the uses and abuses of doubt. And it is written in a register that is so involute and so new for this writer that it demands bespoke criteria. As it happens, the subject of criticism runs through the book, as its hot, live wire. In “Pure Colour,” as absurd as it may seem (no false modesty here), criticism is summoned as a force that might save or destroy the world.
The curtain rises on God, fresh from creating the world. He hangs back, appraises His work. Realization sets in. He has botched it. (Truly. Look around.) Divine shoulders squared, He readies a second draft. He does not crumple up the world but instead manifests Himself into it, as three art critics, in the form of a bird, a fish, and a bear—types you’ll recognize from a comments section near you. The bird regards everything from a great height, and exalts beauty, order, and harmony. For the fish, the core critical values are justice and responsibility to the needs of the collective. And the bear, placidly indifferent to any abstract aesthetic or ethical concerns, is devoted to what it knows intimately. From these critics spring forth descendants. The protagonist is Mira, a “birdlike woman,” training to be a critic, who falls in love with Annie, a fish, cool and detached.
The taxonomy gets jumbled when Mira’s father, a bear, dies and, in Heti’s unsettling description, the universe “ejaculates” his spirit into her. The two are drawn into a leaf, where they live and bicker affectionately for a time. (Deal with it; you’ve already accepted the trinity of animal critics.) The leaf becomes a beautiful metaphor for grief in its trembling state of suspension between earth and sky. Father and daughter speak there without mouths, the leaf comfortably holding their two points of view: “In life, things always have to be undergone to stamp a closeness between two people. But in a leaf, there is no question of betrayal, so there is no question of trust. There they were, day in day out, in the leaf together.”
Years seem to streak by. Mira eventually tumbles out of the leaf and returns to her embodied form. She has a strained conversation or two with Annie. She buys pears. All of it is sketched swiftly, faintly. This book, so full of argument, feels weightless. I note this with wonder, not censure. The characters seem constructed out of cobwebs. The plot is scarcely more than its synopsis, as if to prevent the metaphysical questions from being brushed away again. This weightlessness, this style that feels like the story—how has this been achieved, and to what end?
Heti’s books aim to be vessels for the transformation of reader and writer. She has spoken of writing a book that would be like a Richard Serra sculpture, which a reader might walk through in the same way that the writer has undergone its creation, not knowing exactly where it is heading or how it will end. Her protagonists are dithering Hamlet types, consumed by a moment of uncertainty—about how to live, about how to dress, about whether to have a child—that invariably generates formal challenges and formal invention. In “The Chairs Are Where the People Go” (2011), the challenge is to squeeze Heti’s friend Misha Glouberman’s entire breadth of knowledge into a series of mini lectures. “How Should a Person Be?,” which sets out to construct a story of which she is not the sole author, transcribes recorded dialogues with her friend Margaux that capture the awkwardness and the elisions of real speech, real thinking. “Motherhood” is an internal monologue that steeps the reader in the claustrophobia and tedium of obsessive rumination. Though the formal challenges vary, Heti is always pressing at the membrane between life and art, beauty and ugliness, curious about how much the reader can take. “I usually have the feeling that I’m doing something ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ when I’m writing, which makes me excited,” she has said.
The title of Heti’s new novel may come from Pierre Bonnard, and his self-professed “search for pure color”— his desire to paint the essence of presence and absence. (Heti, reworking her first novel between editions, has a spiritual kinship with an artist who was known to take a paint box with him to galleries and surreptitiously touch up his canvases.) “Pure Colour,” in turn, dispenses with fiction’s staples, including physical description, characterization, revealing dialogue, appreciable stakes, even basic sensory information. Heti is so parsimonious with details that the few she provides prickle and linger: a handful of jewels, “bright fruits,” tumbling onto a black velvet display; Mira leaning over to kiss the back of Annie’s neck. That austerity is a function of the challenge she sets herself—to tell a story about humans that is not scaled to them, a story that features God and gods, ancestors and trees, and unfurls according to their conceptions of history and time. Observed from a great distance, humans appear as broad types, skittering on a bare stage. We still observe them worrying about themselves, in their human way, but from our remove the divisions and distinctions among them are almost imperceptible. In the leaf, Mira’s voice and her father’s overlap and merge. What great effort individuation requires, and how faint are its hard-won triumphs!
Questions of scale—of distance—have long preoccupied Heti’s characters: How close can I come to you, how close is too close, what can I take from you, why do I feel so small next to you, can I be you for a little while? In “How Should a Person Be?,” the character named Sheila becomes fond of a spider living in the bathroom. Her friend Margaux tells her that the spider can be appealing only because of the boundary between them—the fact that it lives in her bathroom, not her bedroom. One night, it escapes, and Sheila, without thinking, smashes it with her hand. “Boundaries, Sheila. Barriers,” Margaux tells her later. “We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them.” In “Pure Colour,” Mira is convinced that if she can just find the right size for herself (regarding herself as neither too important nor too insignificant), and sort out her ideal proximity to other people (neither too needy nor too remote), she will not be hurt and she will not hurt anyone else. It is a problem of perception, she realizes. As a resident in the leaf, she is chastened by the easy acceptance she finds in nature: “She hadn’t known that plants were the grateful recipients of all consciousness—not only of people, but of snails and squirrels and rain and the sun; that it was their generosity that made them so lush and green, the very colour of welcome.” To exist like this, as pure welcome that asks nothing in return, to offer her father’s bearlike adoration—this is the way to live in the world, she muses. She is ashamed of being a bird-woman, reflexively scanning for beauty and order, assessing and tearing apart, mauling the world with her mind. “To criticize something becomes joined with killing and winning,” she complains to her father in the sanctuary of the leaf; she is appalled to belong to the ranks of critics who think that this destructive vainglory is “the best thing about them!”
What feeds and enables such critics—the “walking dead”—goes unnamed in the book. The Internet is invoked only through coy references to the world without it: “back then,” the “before.” It has collapsed a distance between people that once conferred safety, privacy, and some relief from the constant presence of other minds. It has prevented us from seeing ourselves in correct proportion to the world, and turned us into devouring critics of one another:
Mira wonders if she can cease thinking of herself as someone “who another person could see, evaluate, and finally judge.” She wonders whether her method of criticism could be salvaged, disentangled from this rage: “She just wanted to feel the same happiness, appreciation, and beauty that she had felt when her father’s spirit came into her. Yet even that feeling—that corrective desire—was the desire and wish of a critic.”
Do we really “murder to dissect,” as Wordsworth held? What harm do I commit if I step away from my bearish defense of Heti and, in an avian cast of mind, survey the novel’s inconsistencies, the muddled cosmology that governs its world? (Along with the Abrahamic artist-God, there is a host of other gods who, with no clear logic or agenda, inhabit humans and take the form of viruses.) Or if I note the occasionally strained oracular effects, and platitudes best left to needlework samplers? Mira struggles on this score, fighting against her instincts. She briefly decides to make herself passive, to regard the world with only love. And yet criticism can itself be a form of intimacy, a capacity to value flaws as something like a wobble in a line, evidence of a human hand, of human striving. Sometimes we can see the reach only when the grasp fails.
In Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, the character Lenù has an awakening when she realizes what a deferential reader she is. “I never actually used them,” she says of the books she has read. “I never turned them against themselves. This is thinking.” Heti’s books turn against themselves, with their circling, burrowing questions. Mira certainly turns on herself and begins thinking when she poses the question: How should a critic be? Some books endure through the ages, she muses. “But how does that happen? And why does it happen to some books, not others? Who is responsible for ushering books forth, and who is merely wearing the clothes of the usher?” She is aided when her father’s spirit infuses her with “the gifts of patience, perspective and detachment.” (As good a credo as any, although I’d put more stock in Melville’s “Time, Cash, Strength, Patience.”)
Heti’s own temple is a place of both protection and predation. “Life was always playing its tricks,” Mira reflects, “never just giving, and never just taking away, but always both.” In the Japanese folktale, comfortingly, art defeats the monster, and yet we shouldn’t regret that some goblin rats cannot be so easily vanquished. We’d be lost without them. The boy’s cats, with their wet, red mouths, represent a final, conclusive victory. But we know what happens next. The boy will cock his head to one side. He will walk to the wall. With his thumb, he will rub away an errant whisker, or maybe the crooked tip of a tail. He will kneel down to correct and resume his work—the drawing, the doubting, the persistence. ♦
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