Liberties

On the fourth page of Pure Colour, the fourth and most recent novel by the Canadian writer Sheila Heti, it is proposed that there are three kinds of beings on the face of the earth. They are each a different kind of “critic,” tasked with helping God to improve upon His “first draft” of the universe. There are birds who “consider the world as if from a distance” and are interested in beauty above all. There are fish who “critique from the middle” and are consumed by the “condition of the many.” And there are bears who “do not have a pragmatic way of thinking” and are “deeply consumed with their own.” The three main characters in the novel track with the three types: Mira, the art critic and main character, is a bird; Mira’s father, whose death takes up the middle part of the novel, is a bear; and Mira’s romantic interest and colleague at a school for art critics, Annie, is a fish.

The bird, the bear, and the fish are the basis for an inquiry into different value systems and the ways of perceiving the world that follow from them. The schema itself evokes a competition-to-the-death: birds and bears both eat fish. But the competition Heti is interested in occurs in the social world, not the natural one. There, conflict need not be fatal, but it remains a significant and even a necessary aspect of social life in modern secular societies. For what defines the three types is more than a matter of personality, or sensibility. It concerns what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls “strong evaluations”: that is, the kind of choices and commitments that individuals living in those societies make to express “the kind of beings we are or want to be.”

Heti has spoken of writing Pure Colour during the Trump years, and of it being her way of responding to the ambient conviction that it was “frivolous” to be an artist during such a politically charged time. It is appropriate, then, that the central conflict in the book is between Mira, the artistic sensibility, and Annie, the political one. To be sure, the virtues of the fish are not dismissed, and toward the end of the novel Annie offers Mira an impersonal kind of comfort (perhaps the only kind she is capable of offering). Through Mira’s eyes, Heti acknowledges that fish can be driven by a true and beautiful compassion for others, and that sometimes they are the ones who “see the whole picture most clearly.” The novel nevertheless traces a deep and often hostile incompatibility between the worldviews of the bird and the fish. Mira, who sees beauty in the world just as it is, calls Annie a “fixer” because she is always telling people her “own ideas about things; about relationships and the psyche and the world of people, and what it meant to be in a family… meddling in the structure that had been given to humans, as old as a tree.” Toward the end of the book, she envisions finding Annie in the small town where she has gone to help people “repair their collective delusions” and telling her that fixers are “the wrong thing to be.” Annie listens “politely, with a face of cold marble.” Then she tells Mira that she is just repeating patriarchal talking points she learned from her father. “I still think it’s wrong to be a fixer,” says Mira. “That’s rich for you to say!,” responds Annie “you, who have never tried to fix anything!” (Italics Mira’s.)

The majority of Heti’s fiction, and all three of her novels, beginning with How Should a Person Be? in 2012, have been published during a decade in which strong evaluations have trended in one direction: toward that of the fixers. Far from standing for all ways of caring about the “condition of the many” — that is, of engaging in politics — the fixer names an ethos that has become conspicuous on the progressive left in recent years: it appears in Annie’s character as a kind of therapeutic moralism, which takes little notice of the compromise and contestation traditionally thought of as intrinsic to political life. Like many who call for the breaking down of every border and convention, Annie conceives of the lines delineating communities — whether biological, like the family, or political, like the state — as arbitrary and meretricious; all that stands in the way of her utopia is the ignorance and laziness of those who have not read the right books or learned the most up-to-date vocabulary. In her claim that Mira’s criticism is merely the result of her having internalized the patriarchal claims of her father, it is easy to hear the moralists’ characteristic skepticism that any defensible value system besides their own is even possible, much less something to be consciously cultivated.

Much has been made in recent years about the problem of political polarization, but just as distinctive of the period — perhaps more distinctive, since polarization in American politics is perennial, and inevitable — has been the accompanying encroachment of the ethos of the fixers across the categories of left-liberal society and culture. This includes the categories of art and literature, much as it might seem that aesthetic values would preclude the utilitarian bias at the heart of therapeutic moralism. Dispiritingly, the most common response of contemporary novelists to the encroachment of this ethos has been to submit their manuscripts dutifully to the panels of fixers for judgment, approval and, occasionally, a surely justified censure. “Our art has become exhaustively political, but it is no longer discernibly subversive,” observed the writer Greg Jackson about the literature of the Trump years, “It is what major cultural institutions, foundations, and media organizations find congenial.”

Heti, while feeling the same pressures as other artists, has chosen a different tack, of which Pure Colour is only the most explicit example. In each of her novels, she constructs a coliseum wherein the bearers of different strong evaluations do battle. The battle is not really a battle; it is more like a conversation, and the setting is of course not a coliseum; rather, the characters talk in bars and hair salons, at poetry readings, and inside a leaf. They talk about grief, beauty, friendship, finitude, blowjobs, the soul, the intimacy of cutting hair, and the ecstasy of buying the perfectly colored lamp. They make jokes and ask a lot of earnest open-ended questions, of each other and sometimes of the universe. But the casual or whimsical quality of these dialogues ought not distract us from the fact that each of them has a winner, and in each the winner is art.

It may seem like no surprise that Heti, an artist, prefers art. This is why it is so important to read Heti’s fiction as itself in conversation with the moralization of culture that her critics and commentators have more often fallen victim to than managed to identify as one of her main targets. Heti does not ignore therapeutic moralism so much as she engages it within her fiction for what it is, or should be, to the artist: a stumbling block to the creation of genuine art. Perhaps we can learn something from her example about how to emerge from this long season of aesthetic retreat.

As with so many other things, the Trump presidency accelerated in both speed and vulgarity a process that was already underway in literary culture. Heti, who published her early short stories in McSweeneys, and the first excerpt from what would become her first novel in n+1, began writing in the early 2000s, at what can now be seen as a transitional moment for art and culture. It was not entirely true, as some alleged, that postmodernism ended with 9/11, but it was the case that, for a variety of reasons, a new social seriousness seemed to enter into the literary world around that time. Almost a decade before 9/11, David Foster Wallace had already announced the exhaustion of postmodern irony and alienation, calling for fiction writers to return their attention to the “desperate questions” of human experience. Along with several other writers, musicians, and filmmakers calling for a program of “new sincerity” in art and culture, he would become an unacknowledged legislator of the coming age of conviction.

But what should artists be sincere about? This is a question Wallace never got around to fully answering before he hanged himself in his California home in 2008. A suggestion that was to prove appealing to the novelists of the following generation, however, had already appeared three years earlier in Benjamin Kunkel’s novel Indecision. Kunkel was one of the founders of n+1, a magazine that played a not insignificant part in bringing political sincerity back into fashion on the young left — in part, as Kunkel’s novel indicates, at the direct expense of aesthetics. The narrator of Indecision is Dwight B. Wilmerding, a 28-year-old pharmaceutical worker who wanders between jobs, romantic entanglements, and self-conceptions, once remarking that he feels “like a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world.” Then, in a surprise ending, Dwight cures his ambivalence and apathy — and also his romantic frustrations — by moving with a new girlfriend to Ecuador and becoming a “democratic socialist” doing public relations for oppressed workers. It is a reversal of the classic structure of the bildungsroman: whereas the artist’s development typically culminates with him learning to speak for himself, Dwight’s ends with him training his voice to serve his political commitments.

Kunkel showed how seriously he took his novel’s ending when, in subsequent years, he abandoned fiction and devoted himself to writing long essays on Marxism and political economy. His shift was indicative of a move by many of his generation’s novelists, or would-be novelists, into the genre of the political or sociological essay. Some, like Jonathan Safran Foer, known for writing two bathetic novels about the Holocaust and 9/11, produced two bathetic tracts on animal abuse and climate change. Others, like the founder of McSweeneys, Dave Eggers, started nonprofits, or advertised their new literary projects as an aid to humanitarian undertakings, whether in post-civil war Sudan or post-Katrina New Orleans. Although they embraced a very different politics than Kunkel (as he dove into the history of Marxist criticism of liberalism, they took their cues from progressive NGOs and Nicholas Kristof), these writers followed his example in disciplining aesthetic ambition to sincere political conviction.

Heti, too, was interested in sincerity, but she pursued it in a different key. She was part of a group of writers who turned to “autofiction” — a genre that blends autobiography and fiction, as the name indicates — as a way to give their novels the impression of having stripped away all pretense and artificiality. Of course, autofiction is still fiction: not everything in it can be assumed to be true, and what appears in an autofictional novel is there because the author wants it to be. Still, the form allowed some writers who had grown disillusioned with the conventions of realism to make a correction in the opposite direction of the postmodern distancing techniques that had proliferated in the 1990s; instead of pulling away, they moved closer in. It was his break with conventional form, said the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, that allowed him to go to the “inner core of existence,” no matter how “small and ugly” were the things he found there.

That observation is lifted from a review that Heti wrote in 2014 of the second book of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, his six-volume “autobiographical novel.” For Heti, the draw of Knausgaard’s project was the way it pushed beyond “our romantic stories about our lives,” as well as the “consensual safety that fiction brings with it, the presumably ethical veil behind which writers protect themselves from their family and friends.” Where “conventional novels make of life something it is not,” Knausgaard had gone “beyond dignity” to create a “realism that is really real.” The project can be seen as a classically modernist one of using literary form to connect the social and the historical to the personal, and therefore to locate the potential for authenticity in an individual life. But whereas for the early twentieth-century modernists this process had involved elaborate formal and stylistic experiments, the autofictionists of the 2010s eschewed plot and scene setting, gravitating instead toward a style that was casual and conversational, at times even sloppy, in hopes of offering relief from the onslaught of artificiality and “artful” messaging in the broader culture. A corollary could be found in the image that each group conjured of the artist: Joyce’s godly figure, “paring his fingernails” above his “invisible” creation, gives way in Knausgaard and Heti to the author as the fully implicated, sometimes shambolic center of their own story, a non-genius who is constantly remonstrating with themselves for not being a better person, or a more committed artist. Indeed, one of the recurring themes in the autofiction of Knausgaard and Heti is the — often extremely undignified — struggle of trying to write for a living “in an age,” as Heti puts it, “where no one believes it’s God’s work.” It was a form, in other words, for producing novels that were sincere not about humanitarianism, or social change, but about writing.

Heti’s early short stories, many of them fairy-tale-like parables, collected in The Middle Stories, and her early novella, Ticknor, written from the point of view of the Boston Brahmin biographer George Ticknor, gave evidence of her flexibility as a stylist — when she wants to write refined prose, she can — and for making the ordinary stuff of social life into a kind of absurdist theater. Yet it was not until How Should a Person Be?, her own “novel from life,” published in 2012, that the themes that were to consume her mature fiction come fully into focus. Chief among these themes is the struggle to write amid the multiplying calls for the writer to submit to extrinsic moral and ideological imperatives.

The inciting incident of the novel is the narrator, also named Sheila, being asked to write a play for a “feminist theater company” in Toronto. Initially balking at the request, Sheila is relieved to find out the play need not be “feminist” so long as it is “about women.” But Sheila’s confusion at the requirement, made by one of the cultural institutions in her city, that her art serve a political agenda — even though it is an agenda she supports — offers a preview of the conflict between aesthetics and politics that occurs over and over in the novel, both between characters and in the conversations they conduct with themselves. Sheila’s friend Margaux, a talented painter, “sometimes felt bad and confused that she had not gone into politics.” Sheila’s friend Ben says he has always wanted to be a theater director but, following a trip to South Africa, is no longer “convinced this is a good use of one’s time.” Perhaps he should be an activist, or write something that “evolves into actual engagement in the world.” (Ben declares that art is a “narcissistic activity,” to which Margaux shrewdly responds, “Even activism is very involved with righteousness, you know.”)

As for Sheila herself, she admits that for years she had been asking the titular question — how should a person be? — to “everyone I met,” finding that “in everyone there was something to envy.” At times she fantasizes about becoming a painter, or a religious leader like Moses. Yet the appearance of total openness is deceptive. It is not the case that Sheila is genuinely at a loss about who she should be. Unlike Lena Dunham’s Girls, the popular TV series to which it was often compared, How Should a Person Be? is not a journey in search of the authentic inner self. From its prologue to its conclusion, Sheila knows that she is a writer, and should be writing. “It’s time to stop asking questions of other people,” she remembers admonishing herself during a trip to France. “It is time to just go into a cocoon and spin your soul.”

The comedy and the pathos of the book, and of Heti’s enterprise as a whole, are suggested by the narrative deflation that follows this admonition. “But when I got back to the city, I neglected this plan in favor of hanging out with my friends every night of the week, just as I had been doing before I’d left for the Continent.” The remainder of the novel would not exist had Sheila actually stayed in her cocoon. We follow her as she goes to poetry readings, cuts hair at a hair salon, travels to New York in hopes of becoming famous, fucks a sexual virtuoso named Israel for weeks at a time, becomes obsessed with her friend Margaux, then worries that she has ruined everything by taping their conversations without permission, then reconciles with her over email. But for Sheila, unlike for Hannah Horvath or any other character on Girls, the calling of the artist never leaves her, and never leaves her alone. The novel lingers over her repeated failure to do “what I knew I had to do — leave the world for my room and emerge with the moon, something upon which the reflected light of my experience and knowledge could be seen: a true work of art, a real play.” Not the difficulty of choosing one’s path, but the difficulty of staying on the path that one has chosen, when that path is the path of art — this is Heti’s most persistent theme.

But why should one choose the path of art? Not every fiction writer in the 2010s — or even all of those who wrote autofiction — had the same answer, and between 2012 and 2018, when Heti would publish her second novel, Motherhood, many seemed to lack answers to the basic question of how anyone could justify choosing art over therapeutic moralism. For reasons of sensibility, training, and perhaps of ego, these writers were not willing, as Eggers and Safran Foer had been, to renounce artistic ambition for political advocacy. But neither did they want to be judged guilty of neglecting the moral urgency of social movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and (eventually) the “Resistance” to Trumpism. What to do?

Especially for those who tended toward autofiction, the goal often became to represent this autobiographical tension in their art. In his novel 10:04, set in New York during the Occupy protests, Ben Lerner promised to take his readers on a journey “from irony to sincerity,” though the narrator’s halfhearted embrace of political activism is signified by his willingness to allow a protester to eat and shower at his house before watching him exit the subway at Wall Street on his way uptown for an art exhibition. By Lerner’s next novel, The Topeka School, published in 2019, it was clear that the sincerity being promised would be applied quite literally to progressive activism. (The book ends with the narrator taking hold of the “people’s mic” at a rally against ICE.) Sally Rooney’s novel, Beautiful World Where Are You, juxtaposes the desires of its two young protagonists, a successful novelist and an assistant editor at a literary magazine, for romance, beauty, and spiritual fulfillment against their guilt about all the people “ground to death in horrific ways” while they went about their lunch breaks. In Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind, the adjunct professor protagonist, having sidestepped an environmental canvasser on her way to the subway, imagines several fruitless conversations with the “raft children” of the future, who have little patience for her defense that her “personality is all wrong for cooperative action.” In Rumaam Alam’s Leave the World Behind, a family dices garlic and prepares book reviews in the Hamptons while a never-specified catastrophe closes in on them, perceived only in fragmented news reports and cryptic text message alerts. (The point, said a reviewer in the New York Times, is that “faced with the end of the world, you wouldn’t do a damn thing.”)

It is not quite right to call these novels propagandistic: to the extent they advance a political program, it is taken to be so obvious and obligatory as to render any attempt at persuasion superfluous. I am not sure it is right even to call them political. They are certainly politically correct. But their predominant weather pattern is not moral certainty; it is ambivalence. Ambivalence not about the rightness of their political beliefs, but about the rightness of their decision to go on writing fiction in light of those beliefs. They bear witness to the steady advance of political moralism across the categories of left-liberal culture and, progressively, into the minds of the artists themselves.

The ambivalence of these novels doubtless reflected a genuine structure of feeling for many intellectuals and artists during the Trump years. In interviews, the writers often affected a weary wisdom about the trap of “dogmatic” art, insisting that of course they knew the difference between literature and agitprop. Yet they were just as careful to deny that art should ever aspire to be above politics, and when they were not writing novels they could reliably be found spreading petitions to stop gentrification in Brooklyn, signing their names to open letters opposing Trump’s candidacy for president, or writing op-eds assailing MFA programs for being insufficiently politicized. In the shadow of these books, moreover, there flourished a less ambivalent genre, one far less worried about presenting art as a form of glorified sociology or amateur activism. The controversy in 2020 over the “immigration novel” American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummings, focused on the author’s misrepresentations of her identity while the scandal of the book’s aesthetic nullity went largely unreported; the novelist Lauren Groff, writing in The New York Times Book Review, even praised the novel for being “too urgent” in its moral mission for niceties such as humor, “joy in language,” or “characters who feel real.” On the (slightly) more literary side was Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person,” in 2017, which strained to blame patriarchy for a college student’s uncomfortable sexual experience with an overweight older man, and became the most shared short story in the history of The New Yorker.

Arriving in the middle of the Trump years and on the heels of the ferment of #MeToo, which had contributed to the virality of fiction such as “Cat Person,” Heti’s Motherhood is simultaneously her greatest novel and her most perversely misunderstood. The narrator is, again like Heti, a 37-year old writer living in Toronto, in this case deciding whether to have a child. Like How Should a Person Be?, the book was often taken as a statement of ambivalence, for understandable reasons. The protagonist really does appear to be paralyzed by indecision. Yet also like How Should a Person Be?, Motherhood is ultimately less an ambivalent novel than an agonistic one. This time the temptation faced by the artist is not political commitment, but the creation of new life. The guiding question is not whether it is justifiable, or prudent, or morally responsible, for a woman to have a child today, but what decision will allow the narrator of the book to keep faith with her “actual life.”

The fulcrum of this decision is understood from the beginning to be the narrator’s commitment to being an artist. “One can either be a great artist and a mediocre parent,” her partner Miles tells her, “or the reverse, but not great at both, because both art and parenthood take all one’s time and attention.” The narrator resents the zero-sum nature of this evaluation, but nothing in the book refutes its force. That it is perfectly possible to both raise a child and write novels is beside the point. “Mother” and “artist” are here the names of contradictory ways of being in the world, and each demands, like the monotheistic god, a full and undivided fealty. Miles only says explicitly what a younger version of the narrator had once felt with no less certainty:

I remember being twenty and seeing several writers on a literary panel on stage — both women and men. They said that of course writing was important to them, but their children were more important. I felt so put off. They seemed so unserious to me. I never wanted to be like that—to have something in my life that was more important than writing. Why would they do that to themselves?

It is easy to miss, due to the companionability of Heti’s prose, how oppositional this perspective is to the prevailing common-sense view that life in our time is — or should be — a negotiation between different roles to which one can, with the right intentions and time management skills, give equal weight and meaning. Perhaps some of the book’s critics — many of whom betrayed irritation with Heti’s insistence on drawing such stark dichotomies — were not wrong to feel judged by it. But the judgment was not for whatever choice the writer might make — mother or artist? — but for hiding from themselves the depth of the necessary conflict between two different kinds of ultimate commitment. Following a visit to a fertility clinic, the narrator considers another practical way of delaying her decision: she can freeze her eggs. But she judges that this would be like “freezing my indecision,” a sign of weakness. Her goal is to get to the other side of her indecision, not to prolong or mitigate it. But unlike the narrator in Kunkel’s Indecision, she will get to the other side not by committing to democratic socialism, but by committing — or recommitting — to art.

That there is never much doubt the narrator will choose art over being a mother, and has chosen it before the novel even begins, is therefore not a weakness of Motherhood, as I have heard many readers contend; it is the backdrop for its central drama. The story has its analogue not in sociological essays about work-life balance, a woman’s right to be childless, or the morality of giving birth in the age of climate change — none of which have much bearing on the narrator’s final decision — but in the spiritual autobiographies of monks triumphing over the temptations of sex or lucre. As if to literalize the agonistic metaphor, the narrator compares her wrestling with motherhood to Jacob wrestling with the angel in the Old Testament. To “survive” this wrestling, to have her “life spared,” is not only to resist becoming a mother, but to continue on as an artist. And the novel not only represents this struggle, it is the result of this struggle. “I know the longer I work on this book, the less likely it is I will have a child. Perhaps what I’m trying to do in writing this is build a raft that will carry me just so long and so far, that my questions can no longer be asked.”

The recurrence of the prayer to stop asking questions from Heti’s first novel indicates the strength of the artist’s aspiration to find peace from the perplexities that inevitably cause her to question the ultimate value of her own activity. The fact that the questions do not stop reflects the impossibility, not to mention the inadvisability, of that aspiration ever being fully satisfied. The cocoon in which the artist spins her soul is not a monastery, and no artist could survive as an artist if she lived locked away from the world’s problems for good. Heti often imagines this dynamic in terms of trying to find the right “distance” from which to view her life. If submission to the social roles of the mother or the activist represents one kind of threat to the life of the modern artist, retreat from worldly temptations represents an equal and opposite threat: on one side, the artist risks disappearing into society, on the other, disappearing from it.

Motherhood is Heti’s finest novel so far — one that deserves to be considered not as part of the exploding contemporary literature on motherhood, but as a literary parable in the meditative modernist tradition inaugurated by The Trial — in part because she achieves the perfect distance from her subject-matter. The narrator of the novel is close enough to make the personal stakes of the choice she has before her seem real and vital, while she is also far enough away to invest those stakes with an impersonal dimension that outstrips any merely subjective or sociological significance. The style in which she decides the content of her “actual life” indicates the inescapably aesthetic aspect of the choices we all make to shape the composition of our lives as a whole.

Motherhood also represents an advance in Heti’s thinking about art. The advance comes because Heti takes the temptation of motherhood so much more seriously than she does the temptation of politics. In contending with the good of creating new life, far more than in contending with the (more ambiguous, in Heti’s estimation) good of therapeutic moralism, the artist is compelled to offer an articulation of the equal or greater good of creating new art. And it is in and through the wrestling match between art and motherhood that a new note enters Heti’s fiction, one only barely detectable in How Should a Person Be?. In Motherhood, Heti is inspired to articulate why art can be not only an authentic, a creative, and a beautiful activity, but also a reverent one.

Early on, the narrator tells us her mother had “cried for forty days and forty nights” when she was born, and that the current book “can be called a success if, after reading it, my mother stops crying for good.” The narrator’s mother, born to Holocaust survivors and portrayed as having conflicted feelings about motherhood herself, had always wanted her daughter to be “a dutiful, humble girl.” But the mother and the daughter have different strong evaluations; they do not agree on the highest things. “She wanted me to be a doctor, like her,” writes the narrator, “when all I had ever cared for was art. She didn’t see what there was to care for in art.” The novel becomes a referendum on whether the narrator can communicate what there is to care for in art to the non-artist who is her mother. Whereas some women feel that they owe their mothers a grandchild, she comes to believe that what she owes her mother is the novel she is writing. “What is wrong with living your life for a mother, instead of a son or daughter?” the narrator asks, and then answers:

There can be nothing wrong in it. If my desire is to write, and for the writing to defend, and for the defense to really live — not for one day, but a thousand days, or ten thousand days — that is no less a viable human aspiration than having a child with your mind set on eternity. Art is eternity backwards. Art is written for one’s ancestors, even if those ancestors are elected, like our literary mothers and fathers are. We write for them. Children are eternity forwards. My sense of eternity is backwards through time. The further back in time I can go, the deeper into eternity I feel I can pierce.

Motherhood is not, it turns out, a book about a future daughter, but about a current one. In the novel’s final pages, the narrator describes emailing the manuscript of the book to her mother “in great fear and trepidation.” Then she goes out for a walk and falls down a set of wooden steps. Her mother responds the next morning, blessing the book as “magical.”

The definition of art as “eternity backwards” is not casual; it returns in Pure Colour, where Heti reprises the role of artist-as-daughter, this time through Mira’s relation to her dying father. Heti does suggest a conflict between being a daughter and being an artist, in a poignant scene where Mira, sitting next to her father’s sickbed, reflects on how she has never been able to love him with the same devotion and certainty with which she loves books. Still, we can infer that Heti does not feel the roles of artist and daughter to be completely incompatible, as she does the roles of artist and mother, or artist and activist. Why? Perhaps it is because being a daughter is backward-looking, an orientation toward one’s parents and through them to the “ancestors,” which is also how Heti pictures art. Motherhood and political activism are, on the other hand, both forward-looking (“eternity forwards”). Whereas the one values the present as the richly inherited product of the past — and thus worthy of remembrance and aesthetic appreciation, if not of awe — the other devalues the present as a (deficient) precursor to a better future, a condition that Heti associates in Motherhood with women who are viewed not as Kantian “ends in themselves” but as merely a “passageway through which a man might come.”

But is it true that art is really backward-looking? The claim may seem surprising. Heti writes in a modern tradition characterized by formal experimentation and often associated with Ezra Pound’s dictum to “make it new.” Indeed, the preponderance of the advanced literary criticism of the mid-twentieth century was an attempt to cement an alliance between modernist art and leftist, often revolutionary, politics. The apex of this genre came with Theodor Adorno’s essays on Kafka and Beckett, which held that such literature compelled the individual to come to a full understanding of the unbearability of life in modern capitalist society and thus be inspired to rise up against it.

It is worth noting that, for Adorno, what gave these books their political potential was not any explicit political “engagement” by their authors; it was, rather, their commitment to portraying the world exactly as they experienced it, as artists. Yet however great its interpretive power (and Adorno’s was very great), this style of criticism tended to ignore another important strand in modernist art, which had always been oriented at least as much toward the past as toward the future. The formal innovations undertaken by many modernist writers were intended to preserve those immaterial substances — whether one called it life itself, the remembrance of things past, or the stream of consciousness — that they perceived as being under threat in a rapidly secularizing, industrializing world. One critic described Motherhood as a “talmudic text,” a judgment that might seem to find confirmation in Heti’s acknowledgement that her writing has been influenced by Judaic traditions of debate and questioning. At the same time, the narrator of Motherhood admits that, though she “badly wanted to be religious,” she knows that “God is not true.” Heti can be said to be working in the drift of those modernists who saw their art as the secular vessel for inquiries and energies they could no longer take seriously within a religious framework. The point of making it new was often to preserve something old. “In contrast with those whom we have called materialists,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her essay “Modern Fiction,” “Mr. Joyce is spiritual.”

When the narrator’s mother in Motherhood calls her book “magical,” she gives another name to what the modernists hoped their artworks could keep from being washed away by the waves of modern disenchantment. Yet if Motherhood is on the one hand Heti’s most convincing statement of her commitment to art as against politics, parenthood, or medicine, it is also a statement that attempts to incorporate her mother’s wish that she become a “humble girl.” This implies that art, like the religion it has endeavored to replace, is not necessarily humble, but that it can learn to be. The way it learns to be humble is through the agonistic contest with other ways of being. Agonism, as a form of struggle, implies respect and even reverence for one’s opponents, as Jacob had for the angel. It means continuously asking how a person should be, not because we lack conviction about the answer but because our convictions will benefit from being perpetually tried and tested against all the available answers. Agonistic art models a way of contending, honorably but also honestly, with the sharp clashes between good and good that occur inevitably in the course of a modern life.

So Heti’s agonistic novels show how our own convictions — whether we are birds, bears, or fish — benefit from the struggle to assert themselves against the alternatives that animate those around us. But by choosing in her most recent novel, and the one written directly after the confused response to Motherhood, to make her main character an art critic rather than an artist, I think Heti means also to suggest something about what it takes for the artist in particular to make herself understood. Her work broaches the important if rarely asked question of why the cultivation of an aesthetically literate public for art — a public capable of appreciating artworks not merely as a pretext for the discussion of culture and politics — should matter to us today.

In interviews about Pure Colour, Heti has mentioned a book called Manet and His Critics by George Heard Hamilton, which she finds herself “always coming back to.” Hamilton’s book is a study of the critical response to Manet’s paintings in his time. Much of this response was mocking and dismissive, on the grounds that Manet’s art was narcissistic and undignified, failing the standards of aesthetic inspiration set by his predecessors. Early in Pure Colour, Mira describes a lecture by an “old professor” at her school who, sounding like some of the critics in Hamilton’s study, impugns Manet for choosing a “ridiculous subject matter” and making art that did not edify or “lift up” the viewer. Heti herself has faced similar kinds of criticism, but Manet and His Critics can be consulted for clues not only to Heti’s view of her critics, but also for her view of herself. Manet, as his great literary defenders Baudelaire and Zola insisted, was one of the earliest exemplars of a modernist sensibility that was in the process of emancipating itself from the dictates of both romantic and religious art. Against the demand that his art offer its audience some higher inspiration, Zola recognizes that the modern artist’s job was only “to seek and to see for himself.” Here one can hear the echo of Heti’s discussion of Knausgaard’s enterprise, and by extension her own, as one of finding a form to depict the “inner core” of their experience, no matter how “small and ugly” were the things one might find there.

That a viewer whose taste has been shaped by conventional standards will have difficulty initially comprehending the virtues of such writing, or painting, explains why the critic becomes such an important mediating figure between the modern artist and the society that both produces and is likely to (at first) disclaim her. The point is not that ordinary people are incapable of appreciating modern art; as the example of Manet shows, they are sometimes better able to appreciate it in the long run than are all but a few critics. Yet the role of the critic in the artist’s own time is still significant. It can prepare the way in the broader public for the cultivation of the values and the virtues that are internal to art as a distinctive practice and a meaningful human activity, or it can discourage them. According to Hamilton, Manet’s critics mostly did the latter, often merely “reiterating the public sentiments” rather than doing anything to “clarify the situation.” The lesson is worth keeping in mind as we struggle to emerge from a period in which our book reviewers, literary prize committees, and publishing houses have too often, rather than showing what it means to make judgments informed by aesthetic criteria, merely reiterated and amplified public sentiments that have nothing whatsoever to do with the internal values of art.

Late in Pure Colour, driving to see Annie and tell her it is wrong to be a fixer, Mira thinks about Manet. She reflects especially on his still-life Asparagus, appreciating all the things that her professor had denounced: “the simplicity of his expression, the lightness of his touch, the muteness of his colors, how minor a thing an asparagus is.” Beginning by recognizing the qualities that are internal to the painting — color, proportion, and brushstroke — she works her way out from there to the style of character that the craftsmanship reveals: “the perfect balance between carefulness and carelessness.” Then she moves to consider, true to form, the way of being of the creature who had been able to create and invest its soul in such a thing. In contrast to the fixer, who is always “complaining of being tired,” an artist is “driven to make art by the spirit inside them, making an artwork like a signal or flare calling out, beckoning its kin to come near,” she writes, “That is why an artist never tires of their task.”

It reveals something about our estrangement from a potent aesthetic vocabulary that even Heti’s most thoughtful and sympathetic critics so often praise her as a philosopher or a mystic, as opposed to the quietly crusading artist she has always insisted she is. There are philosophical and mystical elements in all of Heti’s fiction, and much can be gained from examining them; certainly, this is more productive than reading her as a sociological essayist or an ambivalent memoirist. But there is a reason that Heti titled her novel Pure Colour as opposed to Pure Reason, and a reason that the deity she imagines is compared to a painter, who is “most proud of creation as an aesthetic thing.” This is not Moses’s God, it is Manet’s. And it is for this God, especially in times of political temptation, that the sincere artist stubbornly and reverently fights.