Sheila Heti’s latest novel opens with a strange premise. God has decided to scrap the “first draft of existence”; the warming planet signals he wants to start again. So what would a second draft of the world look like? Would it be any better?
Mira, Heti’s heroine, studies at an academy for art critics, where she smokes pot and critiques the paintings of Édouard Manet. She falls for another student, the unerringly cool Annie. But the sudden death of her own father turns her life—and the novel—on its head. She is full of guilt: for the time she didn’t spend with him and the freedom she feels now he’s gone; at times his devotion to her was stifling. Mira withdraws from life, from Annie and her art.
While Heti was working on this book her father died and she was inspired to change direction from writing a quirky romance to an exploration of grief. Heti vividly describes what it is like to lose a parent: “she had thought that, when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed into a different room, and trapped you in it without them.” When Mira’s soul joins with a leaf—one of the novel’s many surreal turns—she has a conversation with her dead father about quantum physics, human consciousness and the Oort cloud. The experience also revives her curiosity about the world—no longer consumed by thoughts of his death, Mira wants to “hear herself living.”
Within a taut 200 pages, Heti weaves together philosophical discussions about death, the soul, love and art. Her writing is beguiling, funny and wise. The novel’s surreal elements invite as many interpretations as an abstract painting. Mira eventually leaves the leaf, sad but determined: rather than await a second draft, she learns to embrace the world, however “scrappy, full of life, flawed.”
