Last night, I saw Sheila Heti who has been visiting the West Coast for the past week. She gave me (among others) a print-out of the first two chapters of How Should a Person Be?, her new book out with Anansi in October. Here is the first paragraph:
“How should a person be?
“For years and years I asked it of everyone I met. I was always watching to see what they were going to do in any situation, so I could do it too. I was always listening to their answers, so if I liked them, I could make them my answers too. I noticed the way people dressed, the way they treated their lovers — in everyone, there was something to envy. You can admire anyone for being themselves. It’s hard not to, when everyone’s so good at it. But when you think of them all together like that, how can you choose? How can you say, I’d rather be responsible like Misha than irresponsible like Margaux. Responsibility looks so good on Misha, and irresponsibility looks so good on Margaux. How could I know which would look best on me?”
I like the way Heti ‘gets into’ the characters so quickly. The narrator introduces two characters, her friends, by desiring opposite qualities in each. What is interesting about this characterization is that it is not a description of a person but a desired quality. Somehow it sets up the characters so quickly that, to quote Ford Madox Ford on Maupassant, the character is “so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been ‘got in’ and can get to work at once.” I tried to do something similar but different with The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis wherein the characters were revealed only through brief statements, here and there, throughout the whole novel, so that the characters did not become full until a later, or even final, appearance, appearances as brief as the first. The character always is there and yet constantly deferred. The affinity lies in the brevity of characterization, and I’m interested to see how this plays out in the rest of Heti’s new book.
