How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life
By Sheila Heti
3/5
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About this ebook
Chosen as one of fifteen remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write in the 21st century by the book critics of The New York Times
"Funny...odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable...unlike any novel I can think of."—David Haglund, The New York Times Book Review
"Brutally honest and stylistically inventive, cerebral, and sexy."—San Francisco Chronicle
Named a Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Flavorpill, The New Republic, The New York Observer, The Huffington Post
A raw, startling, genre-defying novel of friendship, sex, and love in the new millennium—a compulsive read that's like "spending a day with your new best friend" (Bookforum)
Reeling from a failed marriage, Sheila, a twentysomething playwright, finds herself unsure of how to live and create. When Margaux, a talented painter and free spirit, and Israel, a sexy and depraved artist, enter her life, Sheila hopes that through close—sometimes too close—observation of her new friend, her new lover, and herself, she might regain her footing in art and life.
Using transcribed conversations, real emails, plus heavy doses of fiction, the brilliant and always innovative Sheila Heti crafts a work that is part literary novel, part self-help manual, and part bawdy confessional. It's a totally shameless and dynamic exploration into the way we live now, which breathes fresh wisdom into the eternal questions: What is the sincerest way to love? What kind of person should you be?
Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be?, which New York deemed one of the "New Classics" of the twenty-first century. She was named one of the "New Vanguard" by the New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto.
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Reviews for How Should a Person Be?
220 ratings23 reviews
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Self indulgent yuck. Want back the time I wasted reading this. And a shower.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This one hit the funny - in a good way, not the funny peculiar way, although perhaps there was a bit much of her post-husband relationship with fully explicit, overwhelming sexual commandments. It started very, very well with the prologue, where ideas flowed fast and furious, and did create a lot of off-page musings, but then ebbed slightly in the conversational mode, where I think i was meant to be impressed by her friends' hipness, and was. Most of all, I was left a little confused by her rift with Margaux. Nothing much had really happened much between them in the action. I surmised that she had employed a character very like Margaux in detail in her writing while making that character a true winner of 'ugly painting competition', not a creator of ugly painting that can't help but be beautiful, due to Margaux's incomparable brushstrokes. The emotion was subtle, sensitive - so sensitive and so obscure that I think it was a maybe just a little beyond my feeling-and-understanding radar.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beautiful and true.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Miranda July, author, filmmaker, actress, and all around weird/awesome person, is quoted on the cover of my copy of this book (which was received at no cost from the publisher): "A book that risks everything . . . complex, artfully messy, and hilarious."I think those words sum up Ms. July pretty aptly, but I'm not sure they should be applied to this book. I did end up giving it 4 out of 5 stars, but it was a difficult book to judge and in the end the only thing that score represents is whether or not I enjoyed it - and for the most part, enjoy it I did.That said, there were a lot of issues with the book. Most distracting was the fact that much of it felt more like notes the author had jotted down to help her write a book, as opposed to a finished and polished piece. Admittedly, this is clearly supposed to feel sort of stream-of-consciousness and less polished versus more, and in some parts it worked. In some parts, the style felt honest and gave me the feeling that I was spying on someone's conversations and peeking into their diary.On the other hand, there were definitely sections that could use some serious cuts and some that needed a lot more fleshing out. The author seemed to be able to spot an interesting tidbit of conversation, or a unique way of summing something up, but I don't think her and I agree on the best way to showcase these things. There were moments when she went on and on about something that seemed innocuous, only to eventually get to a payoff that seemed it could have been arrived at in a much more direct way. Other times she seemed to get from Point A to Point B before I even realized she'd taken off.Overall I'm glad I read this book and I found the quirkiness to be more good than bad, but I'm not sure how wide the audience is for this book. I would say that if you like Miranda July you'll probably like this book, but based on other reviews it appears that's not necessarily the case.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I really appreciate Sheila Heti’s style — biting, brutally honest, quirky but I wasn’t able to relate to much of what she said.... so it fell flat for me. I think I might be too old for her.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I wish this story had revealed itself for what it was—a deeply mediocre book—before I was already halfway through reading it. I /wanted/ to like this book! I expected the protagonist would evolve out of her shallow self-involvement, but sadly that moment never came. I can’t tell you the number of times I wanted to scream aloud: “Sheila, there’s people that are dying!” All that aside; the prose was lovely in parts (when it wasn’t drowning in self-indulgence) and the side characters were well-drawn and entertaining—especially the best friend, Margaux.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Raw, unflinching, funny, tender, clever, breezy.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5perspicacious, charming, indulgent, pretentious, but also utterly unique and moving.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I gave it 120 pages to hook me. Lena Dunham became the narrator. Nope.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It's kind of Miranda July meets Lena Dunham (who both offered reviews on the back). I really liked the style, because I do like Miranda July, but ultimately found the voice and main idea kind of pointless. All of the characters were silly and not at all self-aware. Overall a well-written but annoying book.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I didn't hate this, but I didn't love it either. I really did want to love it, because I haven't read a novel in a while that I've been absolutely crazy about. I liked a lot of what the protagonist/author had to say about self perception and the idea of being confused about "how you should be," but I guess I'm sort of at my limit of semi autobiographical pieces of art from twenty somethings about finding their place in the world. This book said some of the same things in a new way, but I find the overall genre to be self indulgent and repetitive and also maybe speaks to our self obsessed culture in which everyone thinks that their own story alone will be fascinating, marketable and inspiring to others. But at the same time, maybe ident want to hear about it because I'm living through similar issues? I guess id be interested to see if she could write about anything but herself.
Also I hated (HATED) the last scene. Two of the protagonist'a friends were playing a game of squash that managed to become a symbol for a 20 something's path through their early adult life. It was so cheesy. "Then finally Jon said, 'I don't think they even know the rules. I think they're just slamming the ball around.' And so they were."1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I've never seen Girls, that TV show everybody seems terribly keen on, but from time to time I read articles criticising it for being about Privileged White Girls. How Should A Person Be? made me think of every criticism I've ever read levelled at that TV show which I haven't seen.I didn't like it. I didn't find it funny. It wasn't just that it had nothing to say to me - which it didn't, but that hasn't always mattered in the past with other books - but what it did say seemed so self-involved. Self-involvement is not an inherently bad thing, but this one just didn't do it for me at all. It's not even a case of disliking the "main character", it's more that I'm busy and I don't have much time for this "Will I matter?", "I want to be important!" navel gazing, particularly when it's pretty much non-fiction.Maybe it's a cultural thing. Maybe this just doesn't translate well to a Brit. Maybe, as a creator of art, I have limited patience for people worrying about creating art (because you do it or you don't do it and believe me that you are the only person who cares either way). Maybe it's because people who want to be artists (rather than people who want to make art) make me gripe. Or maybe, as somebody who considers it a life well lived if you make it to the end with most of the limbs you started out with, I was never going to care about a book wholly concerned with creating problems for oneself.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Difficult to see this as a novel, when it distinctly reads as a memoir. Whilst her introspection can at times feel like a swamp of self-centredness - the revelations are often quite profound.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The basics: This novel features a narrator named Sheila Heti. Heti uses some actual conversations with friends in this genre-defying "novel of life." The character Sheila seeks answers to the titular question "how should a person be?"My thoughts: Going into How Should a Person Be?, I was excited. I have a fondness for experimental novels. I may not always love them, but I do enjoy exploring new and creative approaches to literature. As I read, I was as enraptured trying to figure out what Heti (the author) was doing as what Sheila (the character) was saying. There's a sense of late night, wine-fueled conversations about deep things in the early pages of this novel. That will likely either intrigue you or have you running for the hills, but I couldn't get enough of it. As Sheila struggles with her identity, to some extent, but really herself, that identity is caught up in her work:"I had spent so much time trying to make the play I was writing--and my life, my self--into an object of beauty. It was exhausting and all that I knew."This notion particularly stands out to me in this novel, because How Should a Person Be? is an exercise in the artist being part of the work. Where do the writer and character merge and overlap? This exploration was riveting, but soon it became clear there wasn't enough plot. The setup was lovely, but the book's second half felt more forced and stilted. I longed for more conversations and scenes like this one from earlier in the novel:"One good thing about being a woman is we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me. There is no ideal model for how my mind should be. For the men, it's pretty clear. That's the reason you see them trying to talk themselves up all the time. Favorite passage: "I will give up pot because it makes me paranoid. But I will stay close to God because he makes me paranoid."The verdict: While I adore Heti's writing and love the idea of this book, the second half isn't as strong as the first half. As a whole, it's a disappointment, but it's certainly a book I'm glad I read. The moments of brilliance are definitely worth sifting through the rest.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How Should a Person Be? is unlike any novel I have ever read and might be the first fictionalized memoir I have read feeling as if it everything contained therein is all true. Heti doesn't follow any rules in constructing How Should a Person Be? There is no linear storyline, not plot, no traditional literary methods or techniques. Some parts read as if I was following Heti's stream of conscious as it oozed straight out of her brain and onto the page. Heti is nakedly raw in exposing her fears, wants, needs, ambitions and insecurities. Therefore, what may come across as hubris and an over inflated sense of self worth and importance in a less self aware writer feels genuine and relatable when expressed by Heti. When Heti writes about needing to write a play or book that will change the world and how all of humanity relates to one another, I thought: of course!! Do it! Me too! Heti's description of her all encompassing obsession with her lover Israel and her need and complete willingness to be subjugated, humiliated, used and abused by this man due solely to the way that he is able to sexually dominate her is best described by Miranda July when she writes, "[How Should a Person Be? is] a book that... shatters every rule we women try to follow in order to be taken seriously -- and thus is nothing less than groundbreaking..."
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sheila Heti's novel is a remarkable piece of work - and you may love, or hate, it but if you read this book, you will surely learn something from it. Heti very groups herself amongst "ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be human." And in having exposed her innermost thoughts to the reader, Ms. Heti is able to explore her own psyche and life, and the universal question of "how should a person be?", with incredible wittiness, tenderness, hilarity and even vulgarity. This may not be an easy novel to read for some, because of the "stream-of-conscious" manner in which it is written - it reads more like haphazard notes written to the self, by the author, than a properly written novel. But this quirk makes it that much more personable - like the author wanted to be able to pour out her soul in its entirety, with no editing or packaging of any sort. I, for one, really enjoyed being able to read her unabashed, and incredibly bold, thoughts in such a manner.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5As an account of the artistic paralysis and self-consciousness that attacks writers, Lerner's "Leaving the Atocha Station" is a more satisfying and fleshed-out work. Heti often strives for a harmony between the grandiose and the vulgar, and it does not always work well. This is still, however, a very readable and often insightful novel.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I received this book as an Early Reviewer. Sheila, the main character and narrator, is a playwright and the book follows her through a journey of self. She is trying to figure out how she should be and for the majority of the book, lives only as a reflection of what others think of her or of how she wants to be perceived. Perhaps I'm reading this at a time when I can't relate to Sheila, or when such ways of thinking seem juvenile, but most of the book was irritating and seemed to take itself way too seriously. It was fast, easy reading, but I expected more meat.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I just could not get into this book. I finished it, because I had to. I was bored at the onset and it just got worse as the book went on. Very disappointing as I was expecting to really love it. Maybe I've gotten too old and I couldn't deal with the angst. I'd like to say positive things but afraid I can't, even the cover was horrible.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Not a bad book. But definitely not the best book I have ever read. I think the overall idea was good and relevant, but I think there was more rambling than was necessary. I think that the middle 1/3 of the book could have been left out, and I still would have gotten the idea and not felt like I had missed anything. I will definitely read this again later to see if there is something that speaks more loudly to me. I will also recommend it to some friends who will appreciate it more than I did.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I found the premise of a story centered around a person's search for how to live an 'authentic' life intriguing, but was very disappointed in the book on a whole. The writing was choppy, with conversations that were oddly stilted and usually didn't ring true. The narrative was frequently tangential, and the plot almost nonexistent. The main character, Sheila, was neither particularly compelling or likable. Her analyst's comments about a third of the way into the book (roughly pages 81-86) were one of the very few highlights, and aptly drew attention to the immaturity that defined her throughout the book. I'm in my forties, and long ago lost patience with whining, aimless 20-somethings with a huge sense of entitlement and little work ethic. Perhaps younger readers will find much to commiserate with, but I did not.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I really loved reading this book. It's part play, part philosophical treatise, part story. It's about a close friendship, how we can hurt those we love when we mean to help - the dangers of letting someone in so close. But it's also about being someone of value. What is art worth? Is it a waste of time to create art? How do you become someone important? What is genius and how do you discover your own genius?
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a clever book. Because it is fictional nonfiction nothing has to make sense or be tied to the truth. When other reviewers use words like "candid" and "honest" I don't know what they are talking about. What's truth and what's fantasy is not up to us. Maybe there is a Margeaux and maybe there isn't. As readers we are just along for the ride and in the end, while I tried to keep that in mind, I found myself asking who the hell cares? If read as a fictionalized memoir it is murky and smudged like a dirty aquarium full of beautiful and exotic fish or a greasy fingerprinted champagne flute filled with the finest bubbly. In other words, gorgeous writing wrapped up in some psychobabble musings. When trying to read this as an existential "who am I?" it was cumbersome and meandering. However, read with an "I Could Care Less" attitude it was sexy and raw and funny and smart. All the things I am looking for in a good book, truthful or not. I wouldn't want to classify this as self-help, self-indulgent, or self anything.
Book preview
How Should a Person Be? - Sheila Heti
PROLOGUE
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 admired all the great personalities down through time, like Andy Warhol and Oscar Wilde. They seemed to be so perfectly themselves in every way. I didn’t think, Those are great souls, but I did think, Those are some great personalities for our age. Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein—they did things, but they were things.
I know that personality is just an invention of the news media. I know that character exists from the outside alone. I know that inside the body there’s just temperature. So how do you build your soul? At a certain point, I know, you have to forget about your soul and just do the work you’re required to do. To go on and on about your soul is to miss the whole point of life. I could say that with more certainty if I knew the whole point of life. To worry too much about Oscar Wilde and Andy Warhol is just a lot of vanity.
* * *
How should a person be? I sometimes wonder about it, and I can’t help answering like this: a celebrity. But for all that I love celebrities, I would never move somewhere that celebrities actually exist. My hope is to live a simple life, in a simple place, where there’s only one example of everything.
By a simple life, I mean a life of undying fame that I don’t have to participate in. I don’t want anything to change, except to be as famous as one can be, but without that changing anything. Everyone would know in their hearts that I am the most famous person alive—but not talk about it too much. And for no one to be too interested in taking my picture, for they’d all carry around in their heads an image of me that was unchanging, startling, and magnetic. No one has to know what I think, for I don’t really think anything at all, and no one has to know the details of my life, for there are no good details to know. It is the quality of fame one is after here, without any of its qualities.
* * *
In an hour Margaux’s going to come over and we’re going to have our usual conversation. Before I was twenty-five, I never had any friends, but the friends I have now interest me nonstop. Margaux complements me in interesting ways. She paints my picture, and I record what she is saying. We do whatever we can to make the other one feel famous.
In this way, I should be satisfied with being famous to three or four of my friends. And yet it’s an illusion. They like me for who I am, and I would rather be liked for who I appear to be, and for who I appear to be, to be who I am.
We are all specks of dirt, all on this earth at the same time. I look at all the people who are alive today and think, These are my contemporaries. These are my fucking contemporaries! We live in an age of some really great blow-job artists. Every era has its art form. The nineteenth century, I know, was tops for the novel.
I just do what I can not to gag too much. I know boyfriends get really excited when they can touch the soft flesh at the back of your throat. At these times, I just try to breathe through my nose and not throw up on their cock. I did vomit a little the other day, but I kept right on sucking. Soon, the vomit was gone, and then my boyfriend pulled me up to kiss me.
Aside from blow jobs, though, I’m through with being the perfect girlfriend, just through with it. Then if he’s sore with me, let him dump my ass. That will just give me more time to be a genius.
One good thing about being a woman is we haven’t too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me. There is no ideal model for how my mind should be. For the men, it’s pretty clear. That’s the reason you see them trying to talk themselves up all the time. I laugh when they won’t say what they mean so the academies will study them forever. I’m thinking of you, Mark Z., and you, Christian B. You just keep peddling your phony-baloney genius crap, while I’m up giving blow jobs in heaven.
* * *
My ancestors took what they had, which was nothing, and left their routines as slaves in Egypt to follow Moses into the desert in search of the promised land. For forty years they wandered through sand. At nights they rested where they could, against the dunes that had been built up by the winds. Waking the next morning, they took the flour from their sacks and moistened it with their spit and beat together a smooth dough, then set off, stooped, across the sand, the dough spread across their backs. It mingled with the salt of their sweat and hardened in the sun, and this is what they had for lunch. Some people spread the dough flat, and that dough became matzo. Others rolled tubes and fastened the ends, and those people ate bagels.
* * *
For so many years I have written soul like this: sould. I make no other consistent typo. A girl I met in France once said, Cheer up! Maybe it doesn’t actually mean you’ve sold your soul—I was staring unhappily into my beer—but rather that you never had a soul to sell.
We were having Indian food. The man next to us was an Englishman, and he brightened up. He said, It’s so nice to hear English being spoken here! I haven’t heard any English in weeks. We tried not to smile, for smiling only encourages men to bore you and waste your time.
I thought about what that girl had said for a week. I was determined to start the task I had long been putting off, having for too long imagined it would take care of itself in the course of things, without my paying attention to it, all the while knowing in my heart that I was avoiding it, trying to patch myself together with my admiration for the traits I saw so clearly in everyone else. I said to myself sternly, It’s time to stop asking questions of other people. It is time to just go into a cocoon and spin your soul. But when I got back to the city, I neglected this plan in favor of hanging out with my friends every night of the week, just as I had been doing before I’d left for the Continent.
The girl who had given me her condolences was in her midthirties, an American in Paris named Jen. She was a friend of a friend and had, in a friendly way, accepted my request to be put up for the nights I would be there. Her job was doing focus groups for large corporations, including the United States Army, which wanted help with its recruitment advertising. She had some ethical qualms about this but was more concerned with her boyfriend, who had suddenly started ignoring her. This was the central preoccupation of her life when I arrived, because it was the more emotional.
* * *
There are certain people who do not feel like they were raised by wolves, and they are the ones who make the world tick. They are the ones who keep everything functioning so the rest of us can worry about what sort of person we should be. I have read all the books, and I know what they say: You—but better in every way! And yet there are so many ways of being better, and these ways can contradict each other!
Yesterday Margaux told me a story that her mother often tells about when she was a baby. It took Margaux a long time to talk, and everyone thought she was a little dumb. Margaux’s mother had a friend who was a bit messed up and really into self-help books and all sorts of self-improvement tapes. One day, she had been telling Margaux’s mother about a technique in which, whatever problem you came across in your life, you were just supposed to throw up your hands and say, Who cares? That night, as Margaux’s parents and her slightly older sister were sitting around the dinner table and Margaux was in her high chair, her sister spilled her milk and the glass broke all across the table. Her mother started yelling, and her sister started crying. Then, from over in the high chair, they heard little Margaux going, Who cares?
I’m sorry, but I’m really glad she’s my best friend. If I had known, when I was a baby, that in America there was a baby who was throwing up her hands and saying, first words out of her mouth, Who cares? and that one day she’d be my best friend, I would have relaxed for the next twenty-three years, not a single care in the world.
ACT
1
chapter 1
SHOLEM PAINTS
We were having brunch together. It was Sunday. I got there first, then Misha and Margaux arrived, then Sholem and his boyfriend, Jon.
A few weeks earlier, the owners had repainted the diner walls from a grease-splattered beige to a thicky pastel blue and had spray-painted giant pictures of scrambled eggs and strips of bacon and pancakes with syrup. It ruined the place somewhat, but the food was cheap, it was never crowded, and they always had a place for us.
I shared a breakfast special and a grilled cheese with Margaux. Jon asked for our fries. I don’t remember what we started off talking about, or who was the funniest that day. I remember none of the details of our conversation until the subject turned to ugliness. I said that a few years ago I had looked around at my life and realized that all the ugly people had been weeded out. Sholem said he couldn’t enjoy a friendship with someone he wasn’t attracted to. Margaux said it was impossible for her to picture an ugly person, and Misha remarked that ugly people tend to stay at home.
These are a few of the sordid fruits that led to the Ugly Painting Competition.
* * *
When Sholem was a teenager, he had dreamed of being a theater actor, but his parents didn’t want him to go to theater school. They didn’t think it was practical, and encouraged him to go to art school instead. So he went, and his first year there, up late one night painting, as the sun began rising with the morning, a sudden and strong feeling came up inside him that said, I must be an artist. I must paint for the rest of my life. I will not settle for anything else. No other future is acceptable to me.
It was an epiphany and a decision both, from which there would be no turning back—the first and most serious vow of his life. So this past spring, he completed his M.F.A. thesis and graduated.
* * *
Who came up with the idea for the Ugly Painting Competition? I don’t remember, but once I got enthusiastic, suddenly we all were. The idea was that Margaux and Sholem would compete to see who could make the uglier painting. I really hoped it would happen. I was curious to see what the results would be, and secretly I envied them. I wanted to be a painter suddenly. I wanted to make an ugly painting—pit mine against theirs and see whose would win. What would my painting look like? How would I proceed? I thought it would be a simple, interesting thing to do. 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.
Margaux agreed to the competition right away, but Sholem was reluctant. He didn’t see the point. The premise turned him off so much—that one should intentionally make something ugly. Why? But I egged him on, pleading, and finally he gave in.
As soon as Sholem returned home after brunch, he set about making his entry—so he wouldn’t have to think about it anymore, he explained to me later, or have looming before him the prospect of having to make something ugly.
He went straight into his studio, having already decided what he would do. He imagined it would be like this intellectual exercise that he could sort of approach in a cold fashion. He would just do everything he hated when his students did it. He started the composition smack-dab in the middle of a piece of paper, since paper is uglier than canvas. Then he painted a weird, cartoonish man in profile with fried-egg eyes, and he outlined things instead of shading them, delineating each individual eyelash. Instead of making a nostril, he sort of drew a hole. In the background he painted fluffy white clouds over orange triangular mountains. He made the background a gross pinkish-brownish gray, using mineral sediment dug up from the bottom of the jar in which he washed his brushes. For skin tone he just mixed red and white, and for the shadows he used blue. Though he thought in the end there would be some salvageable qualities to the painting, it just kept getting more and more disgusting until finally he began to feel so awful that he finished it off quickly. Dipping a thick brush in black paint, he wrote at the bottom, really carelessly, The sun will come out tomorrow. Then he stepped back and looked at the result, and found it so revolting that he had to get it out of his studio, and left it on the kitchen table to dry.
Sholem went out to get some groceries for dinner, but the entire time he was gone he felt nauseous. Returning home and setting the bags on the counter, he saw the painting lying there and thought, I cannot see that thing every time I walk into the kitchen. So he took it to the basement and left it near the washer and dryer.
From there, the day just got worse. Making the painting had set off a train of really depressing and terrible thoughts, so that by the time evening came, he was fully plunged in despair. Jon returned home, and Sholem started following him around the apartment, whining and complaining about everything. Even after Jon had gone into the bathroom and shut the door behind him, Sholem still stood on the other side, moaning about what a failure he was, saying that nothing good would ever happen to him, indeed that nothing good ever had; his life had been a waste. It’s like you work so hard to train a dog to be good! he called through the door. And the dog is your hand! Then one day you’re forced to beat all the goodness out of that dog in order to make it cruel. That day was today!
Jon grunted.
Then Sholem plodded into the living room and sent an email to the group of us, saying, This project fills me with shame and self-loathing. I just did my ugly painting, and I feel like I raped myself. How’s yours, Margaux?
Margaux, the better artist, wrote back: i spent all day on my bed island reading the new york times.
* * *
Fifteen years ago, there lived a painter in our town named Eli Langer. When he was twenty-six, an artist-run center presented his first show. The paintings were gorgeous and troubled, very masterful, all done in rich browns and reds. They were moody and shadowy with old men, girls, and plush chairs, windows, and naked laps. A sadness clouded the few faces, which were obscured by darkness and lit only by faint moonlight. The canvases were very large, and they seemed like the work of someone with great assurance and freedom.
After the show had been up for only a week, it was shut down by the police. People claimed that the pictures were child pornography. The canvases were confiscated, and they were sentenced to be destroyed by the court.
The story was reported in newspapers all across the country, and the trial played on TV for an entire year. Prominent artists and intellectuals became involved and spoke publicly and wrote editorials about artistic freedom. In the end, the judge ruled in Eli’s favor, partly; the paintings were returned to him, but on the condition that no one ever see them again. He left them in a corner of his mother’s attic, where they remain, covered in soot and mold,