{"id":3803,"date":"2013-02-27T07:22:57","date_gmt":"2013-02-27T07:22:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=3803"},"modified":"2013-02-28T08:35:11","modified_gmt":"2013-02-28T08:35:11","slug":"how-should-a-person-be-by-sheila-heti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=3803","title":{"rendered":"How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Harvill Secker 24 January 2013 <\/strong><\/p>\n

320pp, hardback, \u00a316.99 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Caroline Sanderson<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Never mind how a person should be. How should a person read this book? I\u2019m darned if this person is any the wiser 300 pages later.<\/p>\n

This self-confessed roman a clef<\/em> by Canadian writer Sheila Heti hasn\u2019t baffled everyone. It arrived here from North America festooned with admiring quotes by the likes of Margaret Atwood and James Wood of The New Yorker<\/em>, along with TV writer of the moment Lena Dunham, creator of HBO\u2019s hit series Girls<\/em>, to which this book has several times been compared. Its bizarre blend of philosophy, fiction, playscript, email and autobiography wowed a whole phalanx of US critics, with Dunham dubbing it: ‘A really amazing metafiction-meets-nonfiction novel’. For one critic, it was even ‘a new kind of book’. I can just about see what\u2019s meta about it, but it didn\u2019t strike me as a new kind of anything. Apart from a monster mash-up, maybe.<\/p>\n

Sheila (for reader, it is she) and her arty-farty friends hang out in Toronto\u2019s art galleries and caf\u00e9s \u2013 and try and decide how to live their lives, having \u2018weeded out\u2019 all the ugly people. New BF Margaux is an artist and Sheila is trying to write a dreadful-sounding play, although to her credit she seems hell-bent on doing anything rather than write it. In between working shifts at a hairdressing salon (a job recommended by her Jungian analyst), she does way too much thinking and spends way too much time perfecting blow jobs for the benefit of her jerk of a boyfriend, Israel (about whose sexual proclivities we garner way too much information).<\/p>\n

There are fleeting glimpses of the real trials of life, glinty flashes of truth. \u2018Destiny became like an opaque, demanding, poorly communicative parent, and I was its child, ever trying to please it, to figure out what it wanted of me.\u2019\u00a0 Turning her back on that destiny leads Sheila to divorce her husband. Meeting him again later, they wonder aloud, \u2018Why we pick certain dots and connect them, and not others?.\u2019 I did love that image of life as a dot to dot puzzle. And occasionally I think I recognized a laughable irony or two, such as when Margaux decides autism is \u2018an advantageous trait\u2019, or when the Jungian analyst attempts to interpret Sheila\u2019s dream about flying: \u2018Did you imagine writing the play would get you somewhere higher and better, just like an airplane does?\u2019<\/p>\n

Deciding how, and what to create in a world overpopulated with creations is certainly a dilemma worthy of discussion. And – though I hesitate to use the word \u2018blowing\u2019- it is mind-blowing when you\u2019re young to realize that \u2018one is a reproduction of the human type: one sleeps like other humans, eats like other humans, loves like other humans, and is born and dies like other humans.\u2019 But did I empathize with Sheila\u2019s metaphysical plight? Nah, not a lot.\u00a0 And ultimately I found Heti\u2019s portrayal of female friendship – something I always like to read about \u2013 disappointing. Perhaps I was just wondering way too much about why I\u2019d been told that Margaux and Sheila wear dirty underwear.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s worse than unwashed smalls on page 2, where Sheila declares that how a person should be is a celebrity. \u2018By a simple<\/em> life, I mean a life of undying fame that I don\u2019t have to participate in.\u2019 I never quite got over page 2. By page 4, we also know that giving head often makes Sheila gag. I never quite got over page 4 either.<\/p>\n

Quite possibly I am not deep enough a person to read this book, let alone review it. I do dimly remember once having time for a more self-obsessed life when I wondered for a bit how I should live, and how creativity might play some part in that living. But you know how it is what with having to work, and pay the rent, and attend to other people\u2019s non blow-job needs. How should a person be? Well, write a book about it if you must. But you might be better if you don\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Caroline Sanderson<\/p>\n

Deciding how – and what – to create in a world overpopulated with creations is certainly a dilemma worthy of discussion. And – though I hesitate to use the word \u2018blowing\u2019- it is mind-blowing when you\u2019re young to realize that \u2018one is a reproduction of the human type: one sleeps like other humans, eats like other humans, loves like other humans, and is born and dies like other humans.\u2019 But did I empathize with Sheila\u2019s metaphysical plight? Nah, not a lot[…] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3803"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3857,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3803\/revisions\/3857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}