T-Mobile departs 2-level flagship store in San Francisco's Union Square.'Trade him': Former Warriors All-Star Gilbert Arenas lays into Jordan Poole.By focusing on the minutiae, in other words, Heti comes back around toward the universal. Sheila is a very specific and idiosyncratic person, but she is whole. Some readers might find this navel-gazing a bit self-involved, but in a way it's the whole point.Īll the self-reflection and self-doubt, all the hanging out and hooking up, all the drinks and meals with friends, all these details contribute to a holistic portrait of our protagonist, as a thinker, lover, economic actor and member of a larger community. 'And I was its child, ever trying to please it, to figure out what it wanted from me.'Īlthough the tone of the novel is very 21st century, there is something Proustian about Sheila's obsessive pursuit of truth, her wide-eyed infatuation with the world, her writer's block and the importance she attributes to seemingly normal interactions with friends. 'Destiny became like an opaque, demanding, poorly communicative parent,' she writes. And the prose itself is full of charm, wit, subtle surprises and twisting turns of phrase. The novel sparkles with invention, using e-mails, letters and transcripts from ostensibly recorded conversations to break up longer sections of prose. A brief love affair is a chance to think deeply about the intersection of power and desire, dominance and subjugation.ĭespite all this deep thinking, 'How Should a Person Be?' is anything but ponderous. A burgeoning friendship becomes a meditation on platonic love and the nature of the feminine. An ugly-painting competition gives her a chance to reflect on the sublime and the role of artist in society. For Heti, the personal is philosophical (and the philosophical is personal). Instead, Heti uses this personal crisis to explore the meaning of life.

In the hands of a more conventional writer, this material might yield a predictable memoir about triumph over adversity - 'How Sheila Got Her Groove Back.' With this deceptively simple question as her compass, Heti takes us on a meandering and entertaining exploration of the big questions, rousting aesthetic, moral, religious and ethical concerns most novels wouldn't touch.Įmerging from a failed marriage, the novel's protagonist, Sheila - who one assumes is based on the author - finds herself unsure how to be in the world. As she ruminates on writer's block and hairdressing, art, drugs and narcissism, Heti interrogates how we should be, as people, artists, citizens, employees, lovers and friends. Brutally honest and stylistically inventive, cerebral and sexy, this 'novel from life' employs a grab bag of literary forms and narrative styles on its search for truth. The title of Sheila Heti's fourth book - 'How Should a Person Be?' - pretty much says it all.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti