A creation myth in Sheila Heti's 'Pure Colour' has art critics as evolutionary stars
The novel is simultaneously wise and silly, moving and inscrutable. It is also indisputably working hard to be new.
Sheila Heti is famous for writing about herself. Her early fiction is abstract, sometimes fable-like, but her breakthrough 2010 novel comes explicitly from her life: it helped launch the autofiction craze of the past decade, and portrays sex, friendship, artistic ambition, and rootlessness with jarring honesty. Her 2018 follow-up, , contains the same self-expository impulse, directed at the decision to have — or not have — children. Both books mix granular detail with philosophical questioning; both are written in plain prose that gives even
