How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti - review

There are two ways of writing a diary. In the first, you note where you went and with whom. You detail people's conversation, clothes and jokes. You say who you slept with, and who all your friends slept with. The second way is more inward-looking: long lists of anxieties, hopes, dreams, feelings, worries, pledges to become more spiritual, cut down on unhealthy substances and take more exercise. Of course we all know that the more inward-looking we are, the duller we become, especially as most of us have similar anxieties, hopes and dreams. Recording what we had for breakfast must surely be more interesting than how we felt about it. But some writers have managed to find mileage in their angst and self-obsession. Helen Fielding made it funny and fictional in Bridget Jones's Diary; Elizabeth Gilbert did it without the laughs in Eat, Pray, Love. Now, in this mashup of memoir, fiction, self-help and philosophy, Sheila Heti has added a bit of story, quite a few blow jobs and some cheeky exclamation marks, and finally made it credible. And she's thrown in a bit of the who-slept-with-whom stuff as well. Oh – and most of its characters are based on Heti's actual friends: a group of artists living in Toronto.

In an episode of Lena Dunham's sitcom Girls, the character Ray tells protagonist Hannah that writing about her personal life is "trivial". He lists some more suitable subjects, including "acid rain", "the plight of the giant panda bear", "urban sprawl" and, finally: "Death. Death is the most real." Heti dramatises a similar anxiety about what, if anything, pampered North Americans have to say when for them a big drama may involve, as in this novel, your friend buying the same yellow dress that you have just bought. Our heroine, Sheila, a playwright who can't finish her latest commission, tells us: "All the white men I know are going to Africa. They want to tell the stories of African women. They are so serious. They lectured me for my lack of morality."

Does a person have to be moral to produce art? Or can a person sometimes just articulate their own triteness? ("All I'm saying is: if there's a pool and people are in the pool and you're not in the pool, you want to be in the pool just like those people in the pool. It's just a fact of nature.") Should art always be an extension of an unquestioned project to make oneself and one's world beautiful? Can it even begin with the question How Should a Person Be?, or will that lead to an answer that is horribly self-indulgent?

Luckily everyone Sheila knows finds a way to help with her questions. Even Israel, the man with whom she has intense, compelling sex, and who seems rather depthless ("Would you like to have my cum in your mouth right now, talking to those rich people?"), at one point cautions Sheila against being "one of those people who think they can control themselves". Sheila's Jungian analyst advises her to suffer more. The novel begins and ends with an "ugly-painting competition" set up between Margaux (based on the artist Margaux Williamson) and her friend Sholem. While Sholem immediately goes home and paints something that makes him feel "like I just raped myself", Margaux says in an email that she "spent all day on my bed island reading the new york times". Margaux, we hardly need to be told, is the better artist.

Just when you think Heti has been too cute, or one of her many exclamation marks too archly faux‑kitsch, she will come back with something arresting like this: "Let my breasts not satisfy you then. Let my cunt bore you completely, so that even all the other cunts in the world can't distract you from the boredom that comes over you when you think of mine." The project of this novel, it seems, is not to be beautiful, or even liked, but to challenge the idea that art should have these effects. Art, it suggests, can be humiliating, banal, low. This novel, which includes not just real people but their emails and transcribed conversations, and dangles itself precariously somewhere between "real life" and "art" is, in the end, a meditation on ugliness rather than beauty, and reality rather than fiction. It doesn't answer the question, how should a person be? But it does find an engaging new way of asking it.

Scarlett Thomas's Monkeys with Typewriters is published by Canongate.

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