Ejaculated is a tough word to place in a novel, these days. Nobody uses it to describe dialogue any more and in a sexual context it seems a little functional. Also, for technical reasons, it is tricky to employ from a female point of view. So the reader really does notice when Sheila Heti’s narrator says that something has been ejaculated into her “by the universe” and that something, which is now “spreading all the way through her, the way cum feels”, is the spirit of her much-loved, just‑dead father. But each to her own – you have to admire the leap.
I was pulled into Pure Colour, Heti’s follow-up to 2018’s Motherhood, by a description of life before the internet that held a nostalgia I needed to name. Mira begins the novel in a world now lost to us: it was a time when choice was limited and things stayed particular. This was before seasons became “postmodern”, before we knew that “there were so many ways of being hated, and one could be hated by so many people”. In those days you could see a certain lamp in a shop and know it was your favourite lamp of all time, and “your friends were simply who was around”.
This was how it was for Mira going to a college that is, in this emblematic universe, called “the American Academy of American Critics”. With a group of these random, particular friends, Mira visits a woman’s apartment. It is evening and the windows “just reflected back their sorry faces, while on the outside was the watery night”. The apartment belongs to Annie, who is an orphan, and Mira falls in love with her for reasons she cannot explain: “A person can waste their whole life, without even meaning to, all because another person has a really great face.”
The friends disperse, Mira goes home to her ailing father, and when he dies, the book becomes fully strange. As his spirit departs his body, it enters Mira and it is as though all her deficiencies have been filled up – “all her sorry spaces, all her spiritual empties”. Despite this, Mira feels his absence keenly. Death has turned the world inside out. It is not as though the dead go into a different room; her life has been transformed into a different room, where she is now trapped without him.
One day Mira returns to a tree they both liked and she enters a leaf. She then stays in the leaf for another 40 pages or so – which is a long time in a book, but perhaps a short time to be in a leaf, beyond all desiring, and in the company of your dead father, who is also entirely contented. During this sojourn, Mira considers art, God, love and the transmigration of souls. We are living, she says, in the first draft of the world, which will be rewritten by God any day soon. Not many people will make it into the next draft, which will have fewer mistakes and be less exciting. Meanwhile, “Here we are, just living in the credits at the end of the movie. Everyone wants to see their name up on the screen.”
Pure Colour is the apocalypse written as trance, a sleepwalker’s song about the end of all things. And although the book is full of regret for all that will be lost, there is solace in the idea that we will, mostly, die together. The problem with death was never mortality, but timing.
If I were not a reviewer but a friend, I would press this book into your hand, and say, “It’s a bit mad, but I think you will like it.” Then I might change the subject for a while, because the truth is that Pure Colour will not be for everyone. It spends a lot of time in a leaf. It is relentlessly abstract. And it’s not actually mad, it is a mystical text with its own (not entirely rigorous, but who cares about that) system or cosmology.
The mysticism runs close to poetry and owes, I suspect, more to Kabbalism than to the Christian tradition. Mira is more uplifted than ecstatic: her visions are lightly ironic, fully human and endearing. Apart from the ejaculation thing (itself oddly unsexual), love in the book is desexualised. You might even call it “post-sexual”, if you wanted to talk about female writers, in these anxious days, moving beyond the body to ideas of universal love, or even of God.
Mira finds her way out of the leaf and back into the pursuit of love. Her conclusions are about the importance of family and tradition – a surprisingly conventional answer, which feels like a return. Like a lot of mystics, she prefers vegetable to animal life and is wary of human reproduction. Of mothers (there is no mother in Mira’s life), she says: “Until they pushed a person out of their dirtiest parts, they had no one they could truly love, and no one who could truly love them.” This is, in many ways, the opposite of what I think about reproduction, but this is a novel that is happy to compass contradictions. It is a system, not an opinion. It is a philosophical tale.
There is also Heti’s lovely prose to enjoy, her beautifully sustained tone, the way she is, as a writer, earnest, funny and sweet. Pure Colour is an original, a book that says something new for our difficult times. It’s a bit mad, but I think you will like it.
• Actress by Anne Enright is published by Vintage. Pure Colour by Sheila Heti is published by Harvill Secker (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
