Grant Yoon ’27 is a prospective English major. They enjoy writing poetry for the campus literary magazine, The Gallery, and reading whatever books have a good vibe to them. They also like sitting by large bodies of water, drinking lots of coffee and overthinking movies, songs and things in general. Contact them at giyoon@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
So much of being an artist entails a constant self-awareness: What does this feeling mean for me, for my future, for my ability to create and for my art? How can I describe this in a way that is important and meaningful? This is useful to a point, but when you start asking “How can I articulate this in a way that will be successful, that has a guaranteed appeal?” things begin to fall apart. Originality demands risk, demands a leap into the unknown and away from safety and convention.
When a friend lent me the book “Pure Colour” by Sheila Heti this summer, what surprised me was the faithfulness to the first questions and complete lack of consideration for the last one. The book is honest right up to (but not to) a fault: Heti says exactly what she thinks, what she feels to be significant enough to bind up in a book and distribute. She is not interested in catering to modern tastes or appeals: hence the book’s 3.41 rating on Goodreads. After reading and being genuinely moved in a way few works of art have moved me in my life, I was shocked not at the people who found the book too obscure or eclectic, but at those who found it mediocre. And it occurred to me reading 3 star reviews: Some writers were unwittingly supplying the self-consciousness that Heti avoided writing with.
“Pure Colour,” as a book primarily about grief, looks unflinchingly at what it means to love and lose a parent. It does not cover up the uglier or more uncomfortable sides of this process to represent grief in a safe and pretty way. For some, this is a major transgression. Reviews belie the reviewers’ discomfort with how Heti presents love: One describes the motivating force of the novel, the narrator’s relationship with her father, in a shockingly stupid and insensitive manner: “daddy issues… perhaps more accurately termed enmeshment.” She takes issue with the “very deep earnestness” of the novel, which she finds juvenile — not like her mature and nuanced stance on how Mira has daddy issues, paired with a psychological term that says absolutely nothing of the actual success of the novel. Every work of art can be simplified to being “about” something, but even if, like this reviewer claims, “enmeshment” is the motivating force of the novel, how Heti treats it should be the relevant point, not how this reviewer (an author herself) feels about the topic itself. This should be obvious.
And — this tendency to simplify observations about love to psychological terms or faults is addressed directly in the novel, and this makes people’s reviews even more shocking. Heti herself looks honestly at the usefulness of the study of psychology, a sensibility that seeks ultimately to help people, even as arrogant as the systematic study of the human psyche present in psychology can be today. But her observations about the use of psychology to moralize and decide how we should approach family matters remain intact, despite the feeling that her work is too deeply earnest, or freudian, or overly-abstract or conclusive. It seems obvious from the novel’s format that Heti contradicts herself as Mira navigates her grief, but people seem to be trying to read an experimental novel as a philosophical treatise when it treats philosophy with tenderness and levity. Her conclusions about psychologists being bad (a major simplification, but one that keeps the spirit of one of the novel’s movements) is subtly contradicted multiple times and faulted for being an overly-simplistic view, and yet people review the book as if Heti staked her soul on this claim.
Generally, it seems that Heti’s sensibility is ahead of her time. The pretense of absolutely understanding people, their connections and what these connections mean through psychology is evident in the inability of people to accept Heti’s presentation of multiple contradictory truths about grief because they do not adhere to easy summary. Great works of art do not avoid embarrassment or humiliation, but end up often stumbling upon these things: finding worthwhile things to say requires working with uncomfortable and conventionally perverse, unsaid impulses. If anything, these ineffectual reviews speak to the greater artistic depth of the novel than the cliche and plaintive compliments it would’ve earned had it retained the self-consciousness that people approach the book with.