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! Colour itself came in hard little circular disks, and was shiny like a polished stone or a polished jewel, but with its colour deep inside it. It showed its colour on the outside, for its outside was what it was all the way through. But unlike a gemstone, it didn’t emanate colour. Its colour sat there, turned inwards. Pure colour was introverted, like a shy little animal. Mira had never seen pure colour before, but she guessed there was probably lots that her father knew about, and could show her, and give her, besides these discs. 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.
This passage that includes the title for Pure Colour is particularly apt as an introductory quote for this book; like, what does that even mean? This novel is, at its heart, about the relationship between Mira and her father, and as it expands to include romantic love and grief, the making of art and the unmaking of the world, author Sheila Heti creates the equivalent of an impressionist painting, inviting the reader to meet her halfway in creating meaning. Some parts are straightforward (scenes involving school, work, relationships) and some parts are more surreal (living in a leaf with the dead?), but the writing is consistently crisp and confident and undeniably captures something true about the times we’re living in. Art is subjective and Pure Colour is art; readers’ reactions might vary. Rounded up to four stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
After God created the heavens and the earth, he stood back to contemplate creation, like a painter standing back from the canvas. This is the moment we are living in — the moment of God standing back. Who knows how long it has been going on for? Since the beginning of time, no doubt. But how long is that? And for how much longer will it continue?
Heti establishes early that we’re living in the first draft of the world — the icecaps are melting, species are dying, we’re angry and envious and dropping dead in the streets of a new thing every day — only waiting for God to decide to try again; to make a better kind of human. And while there is sort of a storyline — centered on the (mostly) ordinary experiences of one ordinary woman — it’s the philosophical and surrealist passages that mark this as not your ordinary novel. Some nice bits:
• She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed into a different room, and trapped you in it without them.
• The heart of the artist is a little bit hollow. The bones of the artist are a little bit hollow. The brain of the artist is a little bit hollow. But this allows them to fly.
• A great artist rests back in the easy chair of his talent, and it’s like resting back in the warm hand of God. But Manet’s talent does not rest, and he is oblivious to his own stumbling. He is like a dog who walks with three legs, who believes himself no different from a dog who walks with four! He wants the public to do his job — they should simply feel enchanted. He asks the public to finish his painting, for he is lazy and incapable.
The last bit on Manet feels particularly relevant: Spoken by a Professor at the American School of American Critics (where the main character, Mira, went to study), the ironic notion that Manet should be called lazy because he required his viewers to bring their own experiences to a painting in order to complete it is what Heti is apparently asking of her readers, and arguably, what God is asking each of us to bring to His creation; that’s just the nature of art. I appreciate what I learned about the use of “pure colour” (without black) in the Impressionist movement as I googled Manet and I don’t want anyone to get too hung up on the metaphorical “God” that Heti frequently invokes; she notes that this draft of creation is as likely to be destroyed by an Oort cloud as by the hand of a disappointed deity. And I end by wondering if Heti has experienced the loss of a parent recently: the writing around Mira’s loss — including the surreal bits in the leaf — all had a touching ring of truth to it. And so, knowing we’re in the End Times, how do we choose to live?
Here we are, just living in the credits at the end of the movie. Everyone wants to see their name up on a screen. And whoever wants it is capable of putting it there. That is the work we are doing collectively now: just putting our names up on a screen. We have been given the technology for this one minor thing, here at the very end of the world, this one consolation, this booby-prize.
Everyone is seeking immortality — and even if we don’t all have the talent to create enduring works of art, we all have the opportunity to be “content creators”. What a time to be alive (she noted sardonically before hitting “publish” to her various platforms.) This was a pleasure to read and gave me much to think about.
