Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
Mira and her father live in the first draft of existence: a world like our own, but where people have evolved from either birds, bears or fish. Mira is the most intense expression of a bird, engaging with the world coolly, at a distance. Her father is a bear; consumed by love and empathy. Later, Mira attends the American Academy of American Critics. This fuels her entrancement with beauty. She also falls for an orphan, Annie, a fish absorbed with justness and the collective good, capable of being whatever people need her to be.
Pure Colour, Sheila Heti’s genre-defying fourth novel, is part allegory, part fairytale of mourning, part philosophy of art. Like Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010) and Motherhood (2018), it’s a difficult book to summarise. It’s not a religious novel, but it’s informed by a Jewish tradition of mystical inquiry and ethics. God is imagined by Heti like a painter, first standing back and admiring their work; then reappearing, seeing the flaws and hoping for a second chance to get it right. Heti uses this metaphysical framework, and Mira’s increasing loneliness, to pose questions about how we live and make art in this world; about the precarity of existence; about what happens when worldviews mix; and how we might redeem these conflicts through love. Heti doesn’t claim to have the answers to any of the vast questions her novel asks, but she knows, at this cataclysmic moment in human history, that it’s vital to ask them anyway.
In many ways Pure Colour unfolds like a story that might be told by a father to his daughter, made up night after night, as they go along. Completed after the death of Heti’s own father, it has a repetitive rhythm, circling in and around, that acknowledges the difficulty of moving forward through sadness, doubt and loss. Pure Colour creates its own peculiar logic, but it’s also pure magic, rousingly imaginative and frequently profound – full of pure colour and feelings and the things that matter most.
