AND THEN THEY WONDER WHY WE DON'T LISTEN TO THEM (profanity alert*):

Boldly striding into this theatre of tensions is Sheila Heti's new book "How Should a Person Be?", which shares many of the same concerns as "Girls." Heti's novel documents the unconventional and difficult friendship between two Canadian women, a young playwright named Sheila and a visual artist named Margaux. As in "Girls," Heti's characters don't spend much of their time talking about men. Instead, they discuss ideas: art, creativity, truth, beauty, freedom. There is intimacy in Heti's book, yes, but also death--spiritual, artistic, emotional. Even more telling, the friendship portrayed in it is a love affair--a platonic one, but a love affair all the same. "I could never find fault in someone for choosing not to be my friend," Margaux tells Sheila early on. "But I was disappointed not to have a girl, after searching high and low."

Heti is said to have based the book on her real-life friendship with the artist Margaux Williamson, and her style is playful and self-conscious--a mishmash of first-person narrative, dialogue in the style of a play, and e-mail messages. It has an unfinished, brazen quality that is both captivating and, sometimes, glib. As James Wood wrote in a review of the book for The New Yorker, Heti seems to insist on a certain kind of superficiality: she reproduces all her characters' most pretentious, cynical, and self-absorbed thoughts. ("We are all specks of dirt, all on this earth at the same time," Sheila muses.) But this superficiality is married with seriousness and knowingness. ("I had spent so much time trying to make the play I was writing--and my life, and my self--into an object of beauty. It was exhausting and all that I knew," she explains in a passage about creativity and art.) In fact, in focussing so closely on the ostensibly frivolous conversations between (and within) her characters, Heti seems to be questioning the idea of superficiality altogether.

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