Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

Published by ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 15, 2022

Pure Colour is a patchwork of philosophical essays dressed up as a novel. Long passages consist of a character’s internal monologue. One chapter features of a character living inside a leaf discussing existence with her dead father. In another chapter, that character is living at the end of the world, the end of the first draft of humanity. The theme that binds the chapters is the character’s understanding of human existence as a first draft and the expectation that God or the gods will do better next time.

Mira is the narrator and one of the novel’s two characters unless you count her dead father. The other character is Annie, who might or might not have loved Mira at some point. Mira believes she was “sent into the world” to answer the question, “What is the distance of love?” Pure Colour left me pondering the distance that readers should stand apart from books that ask incomprehensible questions.

When she isn’t writing nonsense, Sheila Heti proves her capacity to express intelligent thoughts in vivid prose. The second part of Pure Colour is a meditation on death and loss, on whether death is loss or something else. When Mira’s father dies, she feels his soul entering her body, an experience that motivates her to consider the nature of life and death. She realizes that she failed to understand the important things — connecting, touching, seeing — while her father was still alive. Those thoughts are expressed in prose that is precise, elegant, and compelling. The story becomes less meaningful after Mira enters the leaf, which leads to a long contemplation of the nature of human existence and love and television. Mira apparently needs to be a leaf in the first draft of humanity to understand her place in the universe, which for most people would be a real bummer. On the other hand, existing as a leaf might be peaceful until the fires and beetles arrive.

Among other tidbits of wisdom, Mira tells us that viruses are “a swarm of invading gods” and that “what’s so exhausting about being ill is that you have been invaded by gods. They are using your body to watch someone near you to see what humans are like in this draft of the world, so they can make them better in the next one.” Rude of us, I suppose, to try so hard to kill the gods that invade our body, but it’s them or us so I’m still taking my god-destroying medications.

Mira also talks about how birds are like artists and cannot be expected to love well because they apply their love to a surface, unlike bears that “join with other creatures much more directly” (presumably by eating them). Mira is undecided about fish. Her observations relate back to earlier musings about differences between birds and bears and fish and the art they will create in the second draft of life, none of which made the slightest bit of sense to me. Mira also explains why God doesn’t want people to fix the first draft of the world so he makes fixers tired. I wonder if God makes reviewers tired when they try to explain books they don’t understand.

In the age of postmodernism, novels no longer need plots. Perhaps we have entered the age of post-postmodernism, in which writers are free to string scattered thoughts together and call it a novel. I appreciated some of Mira’s thoughts, including her suggestion that children are never who parents expect them to be, and “must not be” because that is “how the world changes, how values and criticisms evolve.” She riffs on that thought for several paragraphs without adding value before she decides to be a leaf again, but only for a moment, thanks to Annie who keeps pulling her out of her leafiness. Heti’s prose and some of her thoughts have sufficient strength to earn my recommendation, but only for readers who prefer lush prose and abstract ideas to traditional plots. I think Pure Colour would have worked better as a book of essays but disguising the book as a novel at least induced me (and probably others) to read it.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS