#scurf 107: Towards a second draft of an imperfect life
On Sheila Heti’s 'Pure Colour'
The narrator and protagonist of Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s most recent novel, Pure Colour, is Mira, a girl wandering through life after the death of her beloved father. She also loves her friend Annie, an impossibly cool orphan kid she met during college who was then training to be an art critic. The book starts from the vantage point of Mira situated in what she understands to be God’s first draft of creation, which will soon be scrapped for the next, and vastly improved, version. As Heti’s books go, this too is a wild lounging in the forests of philosophy, ways of being and theology, foregrounded by Mira’s thoughts, ruminations, and insecurities. Through her words, we understand how escapable Annie’s feelings are for Mira, the ephemerality of life beyond death, the corporeal limitations to which we humans unnecessarily subject ourselves to and how easy it is to transcend beyond the set human and other boundaries.
In a time of extreme climate change, post-apocalypse becoming the everyday and the world living through the second year of an endemic, Heti’s novel comes as a breather. She makes us believe, even if only for a few hours, that if our current life is shabby, dog-eared and imperfect, then there lies a second one, not too far into the future. It’s even fitting that Heti —the most memorable chronicler of artistic anxiety in the aughts — has turned her attention in 2022 to a young person’s end of the world anxieties.
In its title, Heti’s brief, brilliant and radical novel does not pose a question, but supplies the answer to one that is implied: How do you make sense of the world as you see its end from around the corner? You turn to Pure Colour(s). She writes: “One sunny afternoon, when Mira and her father were standing in the garden, he promised that one day he would buy her all sorts of mysterious, rare and marvellous things, including pure colour — not something that was coloured, but colour itself!”
Mira’s love for her father haunts her after his passing. She recalls the small ways in which his existence interfered in her daily life, revealing the minute, often unnoticed ways in which we love. Heti writes, “But as Mira got older, it became harder to love him in the proper dimensions, or even to know what those were; any interest she developed in another person felt like it was taking something from him, since he had no one to love but Mira. It was generally a pleasure to be with him, but something always interfered. It was the heat of his fur, which followed her everywhere — clinging and itchy; but also comforting, home.” The basic dichotomies of love tear Mira apart, making her conjure up thorny thoughts, but soon she realises her unflinching love for her father is too much to bear and she conjoins her soul with her father’s in a leaf in tree by a lake, laying out in words the ease with which she is now living with him, as if it were but another brick and mortar dwelling. The writing in these bits shines, as Heti is able to draw in the complete attention of the readers. As far-flung and futuristic as these ideas might pose to be, in Heti’s deft writing, the thoughts are well conceived and even better executed.
Heti’s writing through the novel feels considered, a thread of contemplation running through the course of the pages. Mira is willing to poke at surfaces, rigid waves of thought, to reveal a yolk of rich rumination. In this, Pure Colour reveals itself as a dirge for a dying earth. It’s an experimental story about our world being the first draft where humans are born bird, fish, or bear, depending on how they see life and love, and their relationship to God. It reads both like a bedtime story and a new creation myth, giving its readers a new way of looking at contemporary post-COVID life.
Through the cursive passages, often cut short for brevity and clarity, Heti ponders at the notions of existence, the philosophy behind love and the preciousness of being. Her prose shines with promise, as it lends a new lens with which to look at the deaths of the last two years. In some ways, Heti’s writing speaks exactly to the fears and anxieties of a double-vaccinated world: how to navigate a world riddled with loss, why move, why not be at the same place still as a pond, why move from the comfortable to the unknown? Mira’s curiosities about Annie provoke a similar thread of introspections, leading the reader to think about the perversity of friendship and romance and how much of ourselves are we ready to forsake in a bid to know another human being.
While the book is short in length, at an elegant 220 pages Heti manages to move, frustrate, and animate the readers’ minds, there are passages that seem a tad twee even for her writing. “The last thing,” Heti writes, “that’s needed is to judge your own heart, but then that’s the first thing you go and do. A heart rushes to judge itself. A heart should have better things to do. A heart doesn’t.” It is in parts like these that the reader’s attention crumbles, and a chasm appears in the space between the reader and the book.
Heti’s makes up for it, by returning again and again to prod at the cloud of confusion surrounding our current world and the way in which we move through it. She tugs especially at the philosophical roots, sentimental history, political uses and inadvertent comedy of a particular way of being, in turn revealing an atmospheric, playful novel.
As with How Should A Person Be?, Pure Colour also blurs the line between philosophy and provocation. And as with her previous novel, Motherhood, Heti’s Pure Colour brings her in line with the league of (mostly female) authors writing from a non-place, in an almost non-character-isty voice, ruminating, pondering, writing about life, meaning and philosophy of something, anything.
About a sudden spate of such novels, Man Booker-nominated author Brandon Taylor in his Substack “Sweater Weather” writes: “The novel takes place in an unnamed town in an unnamed country during an unnamed year. Characters have no names and no faces…. There are very few, if any, proper nouns at all. The material of the novel is mediated, relational, and the structures that make up the narrator’s life emerge into existence only for the brief period of time they are illuminated by the narrator’s perception.” As politely and succinctly as he captures the essential mood of Pure Colour, this also points at the ease with which Heti can adapt, move on, and blend in.
In his newsletter, Taylor clubs Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts and Rachel Cusk’s Second Place in an exclusive cohort of contemporary novels dominated by “character vapor”. He writes, “Such novels are frequently written with brilliance and psychological acuity, but they contain no lasting structures or anything of real permanence. The novels run right through you, their primary virtue being an evocation of the fleeting, atomized nature of contemporary consciousness. The speedy phenomenology is precisely the point.” These descriptions fit surprisingly well the narrative arc, writing and sublimation of Heti’s Pure Colour.
Meditating on distance in relationships Heti writes: “…that sometimes a person is meant to move forward in the world with the one they love at a distance, and that the distance is there to make it more beautiful. To stand at the right distance, like God standing back from the canvas—for you can’t see anything if you’re too up close, and you can’t see anything if you’re too far back.” This is a kind of post-millennial, nervy, raw, ripple-y chain of thought that many have felt but seldom put to words, and Heti, in a dizzying sweep captures it brilliantly.
Her conversive mediation on love, the way we are on this earth and how we spend our days, is timely, packed lightly while also cutting through effectively. By focusing on the mundanity of everyday grief, the myriad ways in which someone can miss a loved one after their passing and the grinding reality of unattainable romantic love, Heti reveals the strange beauty of contemporary existence. The fragmentary prose written in a cool, disaffected, almost distant tone, adds gravitas to the musings, making Pure Colour a unique meditation on love, the earth and death, something all of us can make use of in the present climes.
Photo credit: http://www.sheilaheti.com/bio
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