A philosophical novel that tackles questions including the mystery of creation and the demands of art and life after death might sound ponderous, but in Pure Colour, Canadian writer Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?; Motherhood) approaches these weighty topics with an inquisitive yet playful touch that invites her readers to reflect on them with new eyes.
In the surrealistic frame of a story that elevates its ideas over a conventional plot, "the earth is heating up in advance of its destruction by God, who has decided that the first draft of existence contained too many flaws." Instead, the much improved "second draft" of creation "will be like a mature love: long-lasting, decent, steady and right. It will not be like a first love: short-lived, painful, directionless and all wrong."
One of the inhabitants of this flawed world is Heti's protagonist Mira, a young woman enrolled at one of the "international satellite schools" of the American Academy of American Critics, whose students "knew they had to develop a style of writing and thinking that could survive down through the ages, and at the same time penetrate their own generation so incisively." There she meets and becomes infatuated with Annie, a woman she was sure "would change her life."
But Mira's life is truly upended when her father dies after a protracted illness. Despite her love for him, she finds herself reflecting on the distance that replaced the closeness of her childhood, a time in which he promised to buy her "pure colour--not something that was coloured, but colour itself!"
And yet, when he dies, even as she realizes "she hadn't been the daughter he'd wanted her to be; because art had meant more to her than any human being," she experiences the feeling of his spirit entering her. After a time, there's a transition to union with him, joining them in the form of a leaf--an example of some of the novel's lovely poetic imagery--a state from which Annie ultimately rescues her.
Heti is more interested in posing questions than in providing definitive answers, and her style is fragmentary and at times elliptical. For all its musings on theology, cosmology and art ("the act of infusing matter with the breath of God," in one of her appealing turns of phrase), Pure Colour is at heart a story about love and the precious quality of our human connections. It's a challenging novel that beckons brave readers to follow it along its winding trail. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Sheila Heti ponders some of the mysteries of existence in a story that considers life, death and art.