Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
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Pure Colour
By Sheila Heti
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022
Sheila Heti – she of such operatically overrated trifles as Motherhood and How Should a Person Be? – starts her new novel Pure Colour (the US edition has a bland green shapeless blob on the cover. *sigh*) in a high-liturgy kind of register: after God created the heavens and the earth, readers are told, He stood back to contemplate His work, “like a painter standing back from the canvas.” You’d think it would only last a moment, Heti writes, this delay while God stands back, and then He would dive right back into being involved in finishing the canvas. “But who knows,” she asks, “how long or short this world of ours seems from the vanishing point of eternity?”
But wait, non-bamboozled readers might say, this is wrong, isn’t it? In the Book of Genesis, after God looks upon His work and finds it good, He then very much does dive back in to work on the canvas again. This is all of Judaism, and all of Christianity after it. So what’s this business of the universe hanging in existence in the moment between God creating it and God mucking around with it?
Nevermind, though, because the narrative wants to talk about animals. Specifically, three kinds of animals born from three kinds of eggs: people born from the bird egg are “interested in beauty, order, harmony and meaning.” People born from the fish egg are “concerned with fairness and justice here on earth.” And people born from the bear egg “claim a few people to love and protect, and feel untroubled by their choice; they are turned towards those they can smell and touch.”
But wait, the non-bamboozled might pipe up again, none of those traits are mutually exclusive, so are there bird-bears, or bear-fish, or fish-birds? And what does any of that have to do with the pause after creation? And if they’re not connected (as they very obviously aren’t), then why not start the book with the three eggs and leave out the part about God wanting to write a second draft of his creation? Also: given this arrangement, could that shapeless green blob on the dust jacket be a visually-impaired small child’s attempt at drawing an egg? Also: bears are oviparous?
Nevermind, though, because the narrative wants to talk about Mira, a bird person, who meets an alluring woman named Annie, kisses and caresses her without first asking permission, and instantly falls in love with her.
But it’s the non-bamboozled again: wait, who is Mira, apart from her ovate origin? And who is Annie? What do they think or care about? What does it mean to either of them, that they know each other, kiss each other, live with each other? Shouldn’t you, you know, tell us something about them if you’re planning to create a story around them?
Nevermind, though, because Mira’s father is a quintessential bear-egg person, and he’s dying, no wait, he’s already dead. And Mira is deeply grieved (except, we’re told for no reason, when she’s smoking); a great many of the book’s 200 pages return to the subject of her father’s death, with Mira wondering endlessly about what death is, what mourning means, what aspects of her father might have survived his death, and so on until you’re cross-eyed with boredom.
Cue the non-bamboozled: But wait, who was Mira’s father? Shouldn’t we know a lot more about him (other than his egg-status, that is) if you’re asking us to care this much about his death? And how could a bird-egg person come from a bear-egg person? And while we’re on the subject, why is Mira obsessing so much about his death? Doesn’t the narrative explicitly tell us “Her love for her father was great, but her love for books was greater”?
Nevermind, though, because none of these wispy little half-gestures in the direction of some kind of plot or character form more than a small part of the lumpy, runny spilled-soup mess that is Pure Colour. The bulk of this wretched exercise in pure unstructured egotism is given over to two things - first, to cod-philosophical ponderings that are so banal and juvenile that encountering the first one on Page 2 and realizing you’ve got 200 more pages of such drivel to go might very well prompt a bout of Nietzschean existential despair:
Consciousness is a huge mystery, and no one understands how consciousness arises from a brain. No? No, just the fact of a brain, and the leap from a brain, which keeps the heart pumping, to self-consciousness is not something people understand. But just because they don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it’s complicated. I’m not saying it’s complicated, I’m saying it’s a mystery.
… and second, chunks of prose that reads like it was written by a grade school child who’s freshly sustained a traumatic head injury, a stop-and-stare level of appalling prose that legitimately should have embarrassed FSG to publish:
Mira left home. Then she got a job at a lamp store. The lamp store sold Tiffany lamps, and other lamps made of coloured glass. Each lamp was extremely expensive. The least expensive one cost four hundred dollars. This was a month’s salary for her. Every day, before they closed up for the night, Mira had to turn off every single lamp. This took about eleven minutes. Mostly she turned off lamps by pulling on little beaded cords. She had to be careful not to let the cord snap back and hit the bulb or the lamp. She had to pull the cords with a gentle sort of care. It was tedious work.
The cover of Pure Colour calls it a novel, but this isn’t true. There is no story here, no characters, no plot, no action, no dialogue, no ideological coherence, no dramatic arc or payoff, no progression, no chapters, no forethought, and no revision. Rather, this is a book-length collection COVID-19 quarantine jottings, most no longer than a paragraph, half-heartedly stitched together with threads of pure cynicism by an author and publisher who are hoping the bamboozled will ask no questions. Those bamboozled will doubtless be helped by the book-chattering class, which praises garbage like Pure Colour because the awful alternative would be the read Anthony Trollope. So, let the think-pieces begin.
Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.