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How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti5/21/2023 How Should a Person Be?’s deft, picaresque construction, which lightly-but-devastatingly parodies the mores of Toronto’s art scene, has more in common with Don Quixote than with Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls or the fatuous blogs and social media it will, due to its use of constructed reality, inevitably be compared with. I do not think this novel knows everything, but Sheila Heti does know something about how many of us, right now, experience the world, and she has gotten that knowledge down on paper, in a form unlike any other novel I can think of. Heti sees the silliness in the desire for fame that drives such fare, but she also knows that same desire is involved in the impulse to make art. More broadly, though, the novel shares with much reality television a kind of episodic aimlessness, and a focus on young, self-involved characters who spend a lot of time thinking about how they look to other people. But her far more egregious and unusual failing is her utter susceptibility to the ideas and desires of others. Her occasional delusions of grandeur are familiar, perhaps. Sheila herself can be fairly ridiculous, but not in the manner typical of a comic novel’s bumbling protagonist. Sheila has an intense, sporadic and submissive sexual affair with an artist named Israel. She speaks with that questing and ingenuous tone throughout the book, but neither the novel nor its heroine is precious or naïve.
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