Marcie McCauley Reviews Sheila Heti's Pure Colour

Sheila Heti. Pure Colour. Knopf Canada. $29.95, 216pp., ISBN: 978-0-7352-8245-2

Shortly after I began Sheila Heti’s eleventh book, Pure Colour, a friend who was also reading the novel asked if I would consider myself a bird, a fish, or a bear. Heti presents these categories early: “People born from these three different eggs will never completely understand each other.” Almost immediately, I began to query myself inwardly, reframing my sense of who I am, even in the absence of three clear definitions. Not a fish, I answered, about myself, unsure about the rest. Maybe a bear, my friend said about herself. 

Because I thought Heti was a bird or a fish, I wondered whether I’d be able to understand her book. A book which, as I read on, seemed to be more about time than animals, fuelling my growing unease. Despite simple and direct sentences, sections only a page or two long, her clarity provokes even greater scrutiny. I flipped back to reassess the creatures’ key characteristics in response to new characterization. I pounced on passages that appeared prophetic.

The Magic-Eight-Ball styled question-and-answer format of her 2018 novel Motherhood echoes in the following passage, which appears to be about human hands but, with my search-for-meaning mode electrified, I thought might be clock hands:

“Isn’t it nice not to have hands? Yes, it’s a relief. With hands you feel you must do something with them, and be doing something with them all the time. That’s what it felt like to have two hands. The nice thing about not having hands is not to feel the requirement.”

Although readers witness Mira in her ordinary life—she works in a lighting store, has friends, goes to shops and cafés—the most emotional scenes are those with her father in the final days of his life, when time is suspended and weighty. Mira’s father is a bear. (It occurred to me that he could also be a clock, or a lamp.) The most intense action in Pure Colour is the act of querying. Readers are enmeshed with the text through this process, to the point at which uncertainty feels like solidity. Heti’s authoritative prose interrogates the macro and micro, examining and ruminating on libraries and books, trees and leaves, words and letters (most recently in her abecedarian, subscribers-only New York Times essay series).  

We all construct narratives; but Heti extends that process far beyond where most people take it. She asks who is responsible for parenting published works. “How a book has to make it through that awkward stage—when it is twenty years too old, yet not quite old enough—before it becomes something natural, an integral part of human civilization, as solid and inevitable as a tree. To become a tree—for a book—is its greatest hope.” 

By now, Heti’s first book-length work, The Middle Stories (2001), has technically passed the pole: years have accumulated and perhaps, for a book, this is a movement towards survival rather than decay. (Listening to her read from that collection of stories at the Eden Mills Festival, about twenty years ago, I marvelled at her ability to choose an outfit that managed to look simultaneously comfortable and stylish. If only I knew, now, whether she was a bird or a fish, I could add sense-of-style to the appropriate egg’s column.)

But what does it mean for a book to become a tree anyway, when a book cannot be printed—cannot exist in a paged form—without trees? Should I be asking different kinds of questions, inspired by Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010): How Should a Book Be? and How Should a Page Be? Maybe I should be asking which of those questions should come first. Maybe I should have wondered, sooner, if there being three kinds of eggs means there are three kinds of chickens? 

In 2005, her first novel, Ticknor, also upended expectations about fiction. It includes historical figures, and questions how we invent stories, about other people’s lives and our own. Historical personages appear in Pure Colour, too, for example, the Impressionist artist Édouard Manet. His artwork is criticized by another artist therein but, in How Should a Person Be?, the narrator considers him a favourite painter. “I wondered at this; was there something in his hand or his soul - or elsewhere - that was essentially him, so much so that it compelled me every time.” (I considered rereading Person before writing this review, searching for a hint of Manet’s identity as either bird or fish or bear.)

Questions accumulate—about nurturing and creating, inheritance and lineage, art and practice. Also in Motherhood, Heti marvels: “You think you are creating a trick with your art, but your art ends up tricking you. It made me write it and write it for years – the answer like something I could almost reach –tantalizingly there – the promise of an answer just around the corner – maybe in the next day’s writing.”

Some of her concepts align and others contradict. In Pure Colour, readers observe pain and longing, but also beauty: “That we are made to die, one at a time, here in the first draft of existence—that is the pain and the longing. That is the beautiful.”

It’s possible to construct a reading of this novel as being a meditation on loss, as a grown-up version of a picture book forthcoming later this spring—A Garden of Creatures, authored by Heti and illustrated by Esmé Shapiro—which her publisher describes as a story about “loss and the big questions it leaves behind.” 

Maybe it’s a different book; maybe it’s the same book. This is the kind of observation that makes sense after spending a few hours in Sheila Heti’s company. In Motherhood, for instance, Heti observes contradictory truths via her alter ego: both “I live in books” and “A book lives in every person who reads it.”

Where Pure Colour lives in me is alongside novels about transformation that overturn expectations of nature: for example, Christiane Vadnais’ Fauna (translated from the French by Pablo Straus) and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith). Alongside parenting pairs, like Alison Bechdel’s memoirs (Fun Home and Are You My Mother?) and Kate Grenville’s early novels (Albion’s Story and Lilian’s Story). With books by women who reorder the world on the page  (I’m thinking Clarice Lispector and Carolyn Ferrell). With sequences exploring artistic lives, such as Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle and Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet. With Leslie Marmon Silko and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who play with form and break rules about storytelling. 

When I live in Pure Colour, I believe it’s important to know whether I am a bird or a fish or a bear and, if I am unsure, just around the corner—in the next day’s reading—I might find the answer. But Heti also writes: “Anything can run out of anything. A thought can run out of words.” When I’m done reading, I determine the question is intended to persist—that after the words run out, it’s the wondering that matters more.

Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples - including the Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg and the Wendat - land still inhabited by their descendants.