There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Pretentious navel-gazing without the humor of HBO’s Girls, which covers similar terrain.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. After a gambling jaunt to Atlantic City, she returns to Toronto in time for the conclusion of the ugly painting contest. Claiming imperfect wanderer Moses rather than sinless Jesus as spiritual guide, she leaves Toronto for New York, but she’s no happier there. Sheila worries she’s a narcissist, not without good reason perhaps. For a while, Sheila and Margaux fall into a pattern of heavy partying and druggy debauchery until Margaux pulls away. She describes their sadomasochistic antics in explicit, though untitillating detail. He considers himself a painter, but Sheila recognizes his real art lies in the sex department. Meanwhile, Sheila has met Israel, who works in a bakery. Margaux and Heti have a falling-out because Margaux feels Heti has invaded her private boundaries, both by taping her and, more egregiously, by buying the same yellow dress while they are at an art festival in Miami. Heti buys a digital tape recorder and the novel includes actual taped conversations with Margaux, to whom the novel is dedicated, as well as emails between the two.

She spends time with her friend Margaux, an artist who lives with Misha and has entered an ugly painting contest with another painter friend of Heti’s named Sholem. She also talks quite a bit about her search for a sense of self. She claims what she desires is a simple life of fame without having to change her life. Sheila is a recently divorced playwright-the marriage ended at her request for no clearly spelled out reason-attempting to finish a commissioned play while working part time in a beauty salon where her boss Uri is a kind of guru preaching beauty in balance.

Toronto-based Heti ( Ticknor, 2006, etc.) and her real-life friends, including Misha Glouberman with whom she wrote a previous book ( Where the Chairs Are Where the People Go, 2011), are central characters in this meandering novel that attempts to erase the line between fact and fiction.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti