2 minute read
PURE COLOUR by Sheila Heti
pure colour
OR ELSE
Hart, Joe Thomas & Mercer (252 pp.) $15.95 paper | April 1, 2022 978-1-5420-3512-5
A mystery writer threatened with the disclosure of his adulterous affair soon realizes that that’s the least he has to fear. “I know about you and Rachel,” says the anonymous note to Andy Drake. The truth is undeniable; in between rounds taking care of his widowed father, who has dementia, Andy’s been sneaking around the little town of Sandford, New York, with his old school friend for six months. But which of his neighbors in the close-knit community called the Loop is on to him? Before he can decide between the likes of eagle-eyed widow Mrs. Tross, mysterious new neighbor Allen Crane, and church usher Elliot Wyman, a rash of untimely deaths sweeps over the community. Parish administrator Mary Shelby is kicked to death by the horse she unaccountably approached from behind; Ryan Vallance, of the Valiant Lending Agency, is shot; so is his business partner, David Barren, who just happens to be Rachel’s husband. Worse still, Rachel and her sons, Asher and Joey, have vanished, and the week Detective Vince Spanner spends on the case produces no trace of them. Desperate, Andy ignores the fact that every authority figure from Spanner to Father Mathew Travers looks down their noses at him and starts to look for leads of his own. You might think that an author of fictional mysteries would be good at this, but the main results Andy achieves are to goad a nameless visitor to drop in and advise him to leave bad enough alone and provoke somebody to try to kill him and his father by turning on the gas to their kitchen stove without lighting it.
An unremarkable but effective time-killer.
PURE COLOUR
Heti, Sheila Farrar, Straus and Giroux (224 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 15, 2022 978-0-3746-0394-6
A woman considers living, loving, the Earth, and art. Any attempt to summarize Heti’s luminous new novel will inevitably leave it sounding faded and flat. There is a woman named Mira; for a while, she works in a lamp store. Mira’s father dies. Mira loves a woman named Annie. In addition to these more prosaic details, there is the fact that life in this book—existence as a whole, in fact—is a draft. It is God’s first draft. “On good days,” Heti writes, “we acknowledged that God had done pretty well: he had given us life, and had filled in most of the blanks of existence, except for the blank in the heart.” As in her earlier works, Heti’s focus is not only on the world of her own story, but on the very possibilities
