Publishers Weekly
11/01/2021
Heti (How Should a Person Be?) delivers an underwhelming fable, a sort of Generation X Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Here, God has created three kinds of people: bird, fish, and bear. Birds are ambitious, fish are socially minded, and bears love with focus and intensity. Mira, the main character, is a bird, born to a bear father, with whom she has an emotionally incestuous relationship. Annie, a fellow student at the American Academy of American Critics whom Mira has a crush on, is a fish. Heti romanticizes the characters’ time in school, which apparently took place shortly before the advent of smartphones: “They just didn’t consider the fact that one day they would be walking around with phones in the future, out of which people who had far more charisma than they did would let flow an endless stream of images and words.” Mira is prone to overblown mysticism; after her father dies, she imagines she “felt his spirit ejaculate into her, like it was the entire universe coming into her body.” Stricken by grief, she hopes for relief from Annie, though their contrasting animal natures complicate the relationship. Just what the point of it all is remains something of a mystery. Even Heti’s fans will be flummoxed. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
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 . . . So new . . . This book, so full of argument, feels weightless. I note this with wonder. . . Heti’s books aim to be vessels for the transformation of reader and writer.”
—Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker
“[Heti’s] novels are quests for the holy inside the profane . . . Pure Colour is unabashedly metaphysical and completely outlandish. At the same time, this is a book of mourning, specifically for a father. Heti’s tone is more somber and searching than it has ever been, as she turns over and over fundamental questions of life and death, creation and extinction, with her trademark penchant for paradox.”
—Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic
“Just like that, there’s magic. Like Iris Murdoch’s novels, Heti’s are philosophically intense, although Heti’s work is pared down where Murdoch’s was Rabelaisian. Heti owns a sharp axe. In Pure Colour the wood chips that fall are as interesting as the sculpture that gets made.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review
“Part bonkers cosmology and part contemporary parable . . . Different modalities of love, and all the inexact, invigorating and frustrating ways in which they combine, drive the pathos of the book as well as its most phenomenal moments of exultation, moments where meaning crackles and flares . . . Buoyed by a dazzling assortment of questions, curiosities and wild propositions that betray the author’s agile and untamed mind . . . [Pure Colour] brings into view a certain organic and ecstatic wholeness: bright splashes of feeling and folly, of grief and loss ."
—Alexandra Kleeman, The New York Times Book Review
“The most timely, urgent book of 2022 . . . Plot is not the reason we keep reading Heti’s novels. Although to say so also shortchanges their artistry. All of them have shape, accrue meaning and momentum over time . . .Genius.”
—Lynn Steger Strong, Los Angeles Times
“Forthright, attentive, unembarrassed, radiant with wonder, serious yet feather-light . . . Courageous in [its] willingness to plunge so wholeheartedly into the unknowable . . . The fantastical quality of Pure Colour has given [Heti] the unfettered freedom to create, in the knowledge that every creation can only be provisional, a flawed first draft. Uncertainty is the paradoxical binding agent of Ms. Heti’s myth-making and this lovely book.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Everything in Pure Colour, the new novel by Sheila Heti, vibrates with instability, with the shimmering frisson of one teetering on the edge . . . Creation, time, the nature of God: these perennial mysteries are not simply broached in Pure Colour but seized upon with vigor . . . Heti skips and leaps and tumbles, with both the joy of possibility and the brutality of the actual . . . Heti’s most rigorously interior novel . . . illuminate[s] the unified stuff of reality that both undergirds life and suffuses it.”
—Jack Hanson, The Baffler
“Pure Colour doesn’t solely dwell in the chilly empyrean. It has a narrative—which is to say, it has human characters, a human (or humanish) plot, a specific location in history . . . But Heti places all of this human drama alongside the deep time of cosmogony and a world of idiosyncratic myths and wild transformations.”
—Anthony Domestico, The Boston Globe
“Brazenly strange . . . Heti’s metaphorical range keeps you on your toes . . . 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 . . . One-of-a-kind, curious in two senses . . . Nothing less than vital.”
—Anthony Cummins, The Guardian
“Remarkable . . . It is its strangeness that makes Pure Colour stick out, that lends it its emotional edge . . . Pure Colour reaffirms—in both form and content—the possibility of art as a personal, contaminated experience, one which interfaces with where you are (both physically and in life); one which has the possibility to change your thinking in subtler, non-argumentative ways, not toward an articulable view of the world but towards some new understanding of its nuance and complexity, or just back toward the knowledge that other people exist and are people too.”
—Madeleine Gregory, Atmos
“This page-turning novel is strikingly original, and equally explosive, as it follows a woman named Mira who lives her life in a fantastical world, grappling with the amazing and awful things that define being alive.”
—Town & Country (Best Books of February)
Library Journal - Audio
09/01/2022
Heti's (Motherhood) latest book is part personal conversation and part philosophical treatise, examining emotions from joy to melancholy. The grief experienced at the loss of a beloved parent and how that loss affects other relationships is explored through main character Mira. The experimental nature of this work includes Mira finding herself in a leaf that is also hosting the spirit of her dead father and the metaphysical conversation that takes place between them. Beautiful writing with a lyrical quality makes this an easy listen, but it's also easy to lose track. Heti is not the strongest narrator, but her presentation sweeps you along even if you aren't quite understanding what is happening. The plot isn't the point, and the revelations are found in smaller bits, as in the way a few sentences are strung together and what they say about life. The writing is philosophical, metaphorical, and biblical. It invites you to think, but the audio doesn't give you the break needed to let your mind wander. VERDICT An optional purchase for libraries that own this in print.—Christa Van Herreweghe
Library Journal
09/01/2021
The world is falling apart, with ice melting and species dying—as in our world, though it's not ours as we know it; it could well be a first draft that the artist in charge will destroy at any moment. Into this experiment wanders Mira, who is united with her father's spirit when he dies; they exist as a leaf on a tree until she starts longing to return to the human world. From ever original award winner Heti (How Should a Person Be?).
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2021-12-24
A woman considers living, loving, the Earth, and art.
Any attempt to summarize Heti’s luminous new novel will inevitably leave it sounding faded and flat. There is a woman named Mira; for a while, she works in a lamp store. Mira’s father dies. Mira loves a woman named Annie. In addition to these more prosaic details, there is the fact that life in this book—existence as a whole, in fact—is a draft. It is God’s first draft. “On good days,” Heti writes, “we acknowledged that God had done pretty well: he had given us life, and had filled in most of the blanks of existence, except for the blank in the heart.” As in her earlier works, Heti’s focus is not only on the world of her own story, but on the very possibilities of the novel as a form. Again and again, she stretches those possibilities until they grow as taut as a wire. After Mira’s father dies, his consciousness—and hers, too—ends up in a leaf. Best not to ask about the mechanics of this move. In the leaf, they “talk” to one another about art and death and time, in long paragraphs that don’t differentiate between speakers. “Don’t think that in death you go far from the earth,” someone says; “you remain down here with everything—the part of you that loved, which is the most important part.” But at the same time that she is contending with large, abstract questions, Heti is a master of the tiniest, most granular detail. Her prose can be both sweeping and particular. On one page, Mira and her father think of time as a billion-year expanse; on another, she and Annie buy a box of chocolates. The book is as exquisitely crafted as those sweets must have been.
Heti’s latest is that rarest of novels—as alien as a moon rock and every bit as wondrous.
