Book Review: Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be?
“the context of our lives wrapped up in the bow of fiction”
Review by John Barrios
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I don't understand fiction anymore. But then, this isn’t really fiction. It says "novel" on the cover but is described as a memoir. I have a hard time caring about a memoir being labelled a novel. Or a novel being described as memoir. Either have the balls to go all out memoir or just write a novel. I would be just as happy, more so even, if the publishers just dropped the label altogether. Why does a book have to be labelled? Is it for the bookseller, being in such a state that all the part timers can’t be bothered to know their merchandise well enough to properly sort it? Is it that the fault of people like Oprah and James Frey, for pulling off the wool over the reader’s eyes. I mean, come on, did anybody really give a shit that he called it a novel when it was a distorted memoir? Why does Sheila get away with it? At least Frey’s book was solid writing throughout. I was firmly in the teeth, but with Heti, I am often picked out like stray corn off the cob, only to be looked at and reconsidered, popped back in the mouth and stuck again, only for the cycle to repeat itself. Sure it tastes good, but there really isn’t much sustenance.
Every page has a great quote, it's just I don't believe in every one of them. Then again, that is part of the beauty and part of the complication with this book. As a reader I was at once stunned by the great writing, then put off by some of the content. It's like a magic trick. It is also the stuff of brilliance. Her ongoing blahblahblah about not being able to write a play gets in the way of everything I love about the book. Perhaps everything I love is because she is building it around her inability to write. It is crazy making.
This is a part of the new fiction, where there is a blurry line, if a line at all, around the context of our lives wrapped up in the bow of fiction. A safety net. One which needs to be cut down. I say this as I do the same in my own writing. I create a fictional balance for the potential boredom of the real. I'm not saying that is exactly what is happening here, but maybe I am. Maybe there is a fictional me writing a memoir of a book review, and I am unable to write it, because the book broke my heart as it made me crazy. At its heart, the book is about the inability to write. A book I truly enjoyed and hated all in the same sitting. I am at once disappointed in the whiny white girl from NYC who cannot write a play she has been paid to write, while I fall in love with the same woman who stumbles through love and friendship with rich depth.
Life is not a harvest. Just because you have an apple doesn't mean you have an orchard. You have an apple. Put a fence around it. Once you have put a fence around everything you value, then you have the total circle of your heart.
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