“As people feel life,” Henry James wrote, “so they will feel the art that is most closely related to it.” This is terrific advice, yet many novelists ignore it, holding instead to what James called “an eternal repetition of a few familiar clichés.” The recorded conversations that make up about half of Heti’s book are her way of holding life close, without which the book’s animating question would remain unanswerable and unreal. Much of this extraordinary book’s dialogue is taken from recordings of conversations that actually occurred. Its narrator is a 36-year-old woman named Sheila Heti, who, like the author, lives in Toronto and spends her days in conversation with friends about how best to live and make art. How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti (Harvill Secker, £15) How Should A Person Be? is Sheila Heti’s second novel.
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