How Should a Person Be

In the book, Sheila divorces a husband and forms a fast, intense friendship with a painter named Margaux. Female companionship is a strange experiment for both women, who heretofore related predominantly to men, despite being frustrated by their paternalism. The women’s days are spent talking about art, while Sheila avoids working on a play commissioned by a feminist theatre company. Consumed with a desire to foment beauty despite her own stalled creative output, Sheila works in a hair salon and punishes herself by taking a sadistic lover named Israel. Her relationship with Margaux ruptures when Sheila tries to use their taped conversations as source material without her friend’s prior consent.

Cleverness abounds in How Should a Person Be? Deeply concerned with the intersection of art and celebrity, the book is reverent about painters while lampooning performance artists, the commercial art world, wealthy patrons, and even the profession of clowning. This is a book of ideas packed with overt symbolism and multiple dream sequences (one of which necessitates a late-night international Skype call to Sheila’s Jungian analyst). Amidst that heady mix, Heti’s discussions of Jewish identity and sexual masochism are particularly interesting.

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