"It was becoming really difficult to separate my desire to create art from my narcissism," complains a minor character in the Canadian author Sheila Heti's uncategorisable, autobiographical novel How Should A Person Be? His stab at resolving the difficulty entailed a trip to Africa in search of "a more meaningful, uh, component to the work I was doing". Sheila, which is to say the novel's first-person narrator, who, like the author of the same name, is a young playwright living in Toronto, recognises the silliness of her friend's bluster, but cannot help but empathise. She suffers from the same malaise. She, too, longs "to communicate something of greater importance to North Americans than the poverty of my soul".
This longing is not a badge of superiority, but a burden. Sheila sees herself and her fellow artists as marked. They are those “who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human”. It is not an enviable task, she says, and those who are lucky enough to lead more private, fully clothed lives are wrong not to be grateful for the marked ones’ sacrifice. “Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate.”
Heti's distinctive, lightly aphoristic prose runs on a childlike earnestness, a studied naivete and a curious lack of affectation, a mixture that both embodies and critiques what she sees as the problem of the moment – the same infirmity diagnosed by American cultural historian Christopher Lasch in his 1979 jeremiad The Culture of Narcissism. Though she doesn't state her thesis bluntly, for Heti, as for Lasch, the bureaucratic organisations of late capitalism have rendered people essentially empty, moulding us into bland, submissive and sociable performers of selfhood, tormented by self-hatred and repressed rage (I'd point to social networking as another culprit, but she avoids it). The only thing that offsets the narcissist's inner hollowness is a grandiose self-conception. What we seek is a kind of fame, and Heti knows it: "How should a person be? I sometimes wonder about it, and I can't help answering like this: a celebrity ... everyone would know in their hearts that I am the most famous person alive – but not talk about it too much ... no one has to know what I think, for I don't really think anything at all, and no one has to know the details of my life, for there are no good details to know. It is the quality of fame one is after here, without any of its qualities. How should a person be? Should we strive for perfection or a messier truth? Accuracy or enlightenment? Is it important to make others happy?"
Heti’s novel arrives armed with big questions and grand ambitions: “What was so crazy,” her narrator asks, “about wanting to be the human ideal?”
The author smuggles a wide spectrum of ontological inquiry into a complicated, multifarious and surprising novel on the mundane subject of marginally employed urban creative people hanging out (it's a challenging blend: How Should A Person Be? was initially turned down by at least six US publishers). In interviews, Heti has mentioned MTV's The Hills – young female friends navigating a "scripted reality" – as being as significant a reference point as Kierkegaard. "How should a person be?" is, after all, a different species of question from "what is a person?" and "why are we here?" Heti's concerns are less existential than pragmatic, largely worried over the performance of self in life. In her attempts at presenting an accurate portrait of her behaviour, Heti sometimes functions like a forensic anthropologist, incorporating (what seem like) found materials, including emails and recorded conversations.
So who is she? Recently divorced and emotionally unmoored, at a creative standstill, she has earned a commission to write a play about women, a subject she claims to know nothing about. Looking for perfection, she takes a job at a hair salon. In a misguided escape from narcissism, she begins having sex with a demanding, overbearing partner. Her less cripplingly self-conscious, more effortlessly creative friends Margaux, Sholem and Misha, all of whom have real-life counterparts with the same names and careers, indulge and provoke Sheila’s examination of how to be.
Heti – the author, not the character – has carved out a niche as a theoretician of situational discomfort, driven by the belief that getting out of your element is the only basis for discovery. In Toronto, she and collaborator Misha Glouberman created the popular and continuing Trampoline Hall lecture series, in which invited speakers are welcome to lecture on any subject except those in which they are professionally expert. They also collaborated on last year’s The Chairs Are Where The People Go, a beguiling and casual collection of plain-spoken philosophy that quietly preaches the virtues of breaking routine.
An emissary from the same school of postmodern self-help as David Foster Wallace, Heti's fiction seeks a space for the self while maintaining that "personality is just an invention of the news media". Like Wallace, Heti writes with a renewed moral earnestness, and dramatises the madness of seeking to prove one's purity of intent. But How Should A Person Be? is, crucially, a feminist intervention, not just a humanist one, and it registers a valid protest against the idea that the two interventions can be seen as separate. In chronicling the female intellectual's struggle to be taken seriously in a world of Men Who Want to Teach Her Something, Heti steps comfortably into the shoes of the genre-blurring feminist icon Chris Kraus, who asked: "If women have failed to make 'universal' art because we're trapped within the 'personal', why not universalise the 'personal' and make it the subject of our art?" Whether the book is "truth" in a conventional sense, Heti writes in a spirit of confession, willing to share the gritty details of her own debasement. And she wants to be able to see this as freedom: "One good thing about being a woman," she writes, "is we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me."
How Should A Person Be? is at least in part an experiment in demystifying personal relationships, an attempt to reinvest every human interaction with meaning, and nowhere is this more evident than Heti's depiction of Sheila and her friend Margaux's mutual platonic courtship. It's a relationship as tumultuous as any love affair, with its own rigours and regrets. Margaux is a successful painter and Sheila envies her ability to work with an expressive passion that doesn't second-guess itself. This is what an authentically serious person looks like, Sheila thinks. They take walks together, they talk about art, they gossip. Mostly, they feed off of each other's sincerity. But how, Sheila wonders, can she absorb some of Margaux's creative spirit without simply stealing a piece of her identity? In an early scene, she commits a fateful faux pas by purchasing the same yellow dress as her new friend. She will learn her lesson. And she will teach a few. Friendships are not meant to serve as a mutual appreciation society. "That endless capacity for empathy," she writes, "which you have to really kill in order to act freely, to know your own desires."
Heti’s tireless quest for the rules of the game would seem maddening or merely twee – instead of brilliant, forthright and sometimes very funny – if not for her character’s overwhelming sense of gratitude: “There’s so much beauty in this world that it’s hard to begin. There are no words with which to express my gratitude at having been given this one chance to live – if not Live. Let other people frequent the nightclubs in their tight skirts and Live. I’m just sitting here, vibrating in my apartment, at having been given this one chance to live.” And I believe her. Heti’s decision to be the healthiest Sheila Heti she can be is so much in earnest that the narrator’s casual final-act revelation that she is a cigarette smoker threw me for a complete loop.
The inevitable disappointment in Heti's book of blunt imperfections is the realisation that her titular question is unanswerable, or at least incommunicable. But How Should A Person Be? is direct enough to foreground the inquiry that all novels, at one time or another, have in mind. It asks its questions nakedly, so the rest of us don't have to.
Akiva Gottlieb writes about film for The Nation.