The World in First Draft

Pure Colour begins with straightforward scene-setting:

After God created the heavens and the earth, he stood back to contemplate creation, like a painter standing back from the canvas.

This is the moment we are living in — the moment of God standing back.

Heti continues: 

Now the earth is heating up in advance of its destruction by God, who has decided that the first draft of existence contained too many flaws.

Ready to go at creation a second time, hoping to get it more right this time, God appears, splits, and manifests as three critics in the sky: a large bird who critiques from above, a large fish who critiques from the middle, and a large bear who critiques while cradling creation in its arms.

Things get even trippier, but Heti’s prose is so confident I’m not afraid to follow her wherever she’s going. People, we learn, are born from eggs belonging to one of the three creature-manifestations of God. Roughly construed, bird-egg people are artists, fish-egg people are activists, and bear-egg people are homemakers.

Heti defines the outlines of the world contained in Pure Colour with simple and definite prose. It’s telling that the book’s dust jacket, designed by Na Kim, features a reproduction of Ellsworth Kelly’s Green (Vert) from his 1964–65 ​​Suite of Twenty-Seven Color Lithographs that lightly grazes the debossed capital letters spelling “PURE COLOUR” and “A NOVEL.” In Green (Vert), Kelly creates a shape that appears easy to understand, yet whose contours ensure that our understanding of it never remains exactly static.

Still, we know what lies inside and what lies outside of it, and this shape, not quite an oval, invites us to contemplate it through its similarity to, yet ultimate difference from, shapes with which we might already be familiar. The world Heti builds in the pages of Pure Colour does the same.

Heti draws this familiar yet alternate world quickly at the novel’s outset, with few strokes and clear confidence, so that later, when she operates within and reinforces its boundaries, it reads almost effortlessly. Her style is straightforward, imbued with a clarity reminiscent of how adults explain things to children. She restates facts. She formulates sentences with a clear cause and effect. She chooses simile over metaphor and never opts for two words when one will do. She sets up the premise — God standing back to observe creation, bird people and fish people and bear people, a world in first draft — through fine control over her craft. And she does so from a productive distance, with an accuracy so fine-grained as to make her proclamations seem obvious.

There is little room for our disbelief and much room instead for the swift revelation, like a sharp machete through tall grass, that the world in first draft inside of Pure Colour is, in fact, our world.

This world has problems. “Feces, worms, piss, trouble,” in Heti’s words. There is unhelpful chatter on the internet. “The ice cubes were melting. The species were dying. The last of the fossil fuels were being burned up.” What then?

The story of the first-draft world is told through a single life. Mira, our protagonist, is born from a bird egg. She is an artist. Everything that happens to her either results from or points to this fact. Mira’s story is less a narrative arc and more a set of feelings attached to events, the way that all of our lives are lived and remembered: not as a straight timeline but as bombs of different sizes going off in a landscape, their only predictable aspect their ensuing fallout.

Mira loves, then loses the object of her love, a woman born from a fish egg named Annie, for unclear reasons. She gropes for meaning and reason; they do not exist except for inside her. Mira’s father, a bear person, dies. She grieves his death. She tries to understand, tries to order the events of her life with him. She reaches no clear conclusion, but she feels better after all her striving: “I’m sure there is a beauty to being dead, and to being just love, and whatever was best about you being all that’s left.”

This is the brilliance of Pure Colour: it doesn’t make dictums or proclaim rightness about any one thing, about what life is or isn’t. Instead, it takes it upon itself to untangle a truth that’s often difficult to grasp: that despite the fact that our experiences are lived only once, and only through us, the things we do still impact the lives of others. They might even still impact the fate of the world.

We know this to be true on the Left, but we also tend to brush aside what Heti highlights: that we often don’t know exactly how things change. The way that actions turn into reactions can be a mystery. In the world of Pure Colour, it’s the gods who are responsible for it. In our world, it’s unclear. But while we might never know exactly how change happens, living a life that might stand a chance at bringing it about relies on the belief that it does.

Doing It for Love

I wrote last year about Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World Where Are You that it took an easy road out of a complicated situation. In a world that is politically troubling, with no clear avenues to change it, its protagonists settle for a bucolic life in the country, being in love, and raising children. Rooney presents the consummation of true love in the form of a monogamous relationship as the answer to the problem of how to live in a world that is less than perfect and often seemingly unchangeable. Love, in Beautiful World, is the escape hatch from having to do anything about the problems of the first draft.

In Pure Colour, love is not the answer — it’s the starting line. “With a few people in one’s life, too much happens emotionally,” Heti writes about Mira and Annie,

more than even makes sense to happen, given how little has actually occurred. Such people are deeply igniting in a way that others are not. This igniting always happens in the very first instant and it never goes away. No stupidities can destroy the igniting, so even if those two people never meet again, a connection always remains.

The question that Heti plucks out of the connection between Mira and Annie is not what Mira will do to be with Annie forever but rather, more generally and more existentially, “what was one supposed to do with such people?” Pure Colour’s offering is that Mira and Annie find connection because the gods are watching each person through the eyes of the other, taking notes about how to improve upon people for the second draft of the world. What’s at stake, then, is not whether or not Annie and Mira will ever do more than share a surreptitious and too-long kiss on the neck, whether or not they’ll end up together, whether or not Mira can, in Heti’s words, “bring to some beautiful conclusion her love for Annie,” but rather whether their love can illuminate something for the gods, something that will make the second draft of the world better.

But it is better and easier to remember the parts that were life, because while the winning and critiquing part dies, the loving part goes somewhere else; it still remains somewhere. How beautifully love lights up the person in life! How love truly illuminates us! Yes, and whatever illuminated them is somewhere else now, illuminating something else.

Wouldn’t life be better if we lived it this way? If we believed that love wasn’t something we have to capture or trap, that it wasn’t ours to keep, but rather ours to make reverberate? Of course, the forces that bear down on our lives incentivize us otherwise. Under increasingly precarious material conditions, we search for stability and security wherever we can get it, and institutions like marriage happen to pair the promise of long-term emotional security with the guarantee of financial advantage. But Mira’s vision of an illuminating love seems to me to have the power to cut through some of those binds, even if it can’t change the reasons we’re all knotted up in the first place.

Still, Pure Colour does hold the question of large-scale change at its center. How exactly does it come about? Heti asks us to make a leap with her: to believe that love — understood as an openness to the world, a lack of judgement, a sense of peace that comes from being seen — might endure beyond our existence, might act as a catalyst for the world to become better than the one we’re in. In the air after we leap, we realize that Heti isn’t asking the question in the abstract. She’s asking it through the lens of Mira’s life, one single life, which is the only way any of us ask answerable questions.

Getting to the Second Draft

So how does the world change? Through Mira’s father, Heti’s narrator demonstrates a skepticism toward “fixers” — individuals who think they have the answers, who believe they can graft a solution onto people’s problems without paying attention to how they really live, how they really relate to each other, or what they really want. Mira’s father tells her that what matters is family, believing that traditions matter and so does participating in them.

Mira inherits these teachings and tries to pass them as wisdom on to Annie, who bristles, “People should help other people because they are familiar — because they’re also humans — not because they’re family.” But individuals are powerless in the face of forces much greater than them, Mira insists. Annie, meanwhile, stands in for all of us who believe we have a duty to make this world better, to not throw up our hands, to not just settle for imagining better worlds or protecting what little this one has given us.

There is something earthly and relatable to Annie’s insistence that people should try to fix things, that it’s rich for Mira to claim she thinks it’s wrong to be a fixer, since she’s never tried to fix anything in her life. Who are the gods, after all? How can we trust they exist, and that there really is a second draft coming? Perhaps our challenge is to take the leap of faith: To believe that the second draft is coming, that it will arrive thanks to the accumulation of each of our individual efforts, that they will all amount to something greater than the sum of their parts. That our task is to set a good example for the gods, to fight over and over, even if we fail, for the world we’d like to live in.

Pure Colour ends when Mira’s life does. Between its first pages and its last, Mira has endured life “playing its tricks, never just giving, and never just taking away, but always both.” It would be easy to interpret Heti’s novel as a kind of shrugging off of the responsibility to try to improve the world, to read into Mira and Annie’s interactions a belief that their points of view are irreconcilable, to understand Mira’s skepticism toward “fixers” as a mandate to simply accept things as they are. But it is not that. Heti’s archetypes — the bird-person, the fish-person, the bear-person — are useful distillations of how our ideas about how the world works, and how it might change, affect the way we live our daily lives. Pure Colour manages to reverse the direction of that relationship, to imagine that the way we live our daily lives might affect how the world works and how it might change.

Through that reversal, Pure Colour does not invite us to shirk responsibility but to step up to the challenge of determining from which egg we come; of understating the world as well as our own interpretations of it; of reading, in Heti’s words, both the surface and what’s underneath.

Much has been made of Pure Colour’s form: Is it a novel or what? It strikes me now that the nature of reading and writing has changed over the last few years of political tumult. The stakes are higher. Readers want answers. And while the novel has always been a fruitful site for trying on other moral selves, all texts are now charged with the responsibility of directly telling us how to live.

Heti seems aware of readers’ raised expectations, perhaps even of her own raised expectations, and anticipates them not in content but in form. Because Pure Colour lacks a plot, because the source of its narration is at times slippery, it resists literal interpretation and succeeds at establishing a new frame through which to look at the world. In that way, Pure Colour seems to me not a novel but a prayer: that our connections might endure despite our blunders, that the spark of love might illuminate things that lie far beyond its point of origin, that it might spur us to live today, believing that we are each contributing to our collective second draft, that the gods are nothing but the sum total of the force of all our individual actions.