With Sheila Heti’s new novel Pure Colour, Heti paints a setting of living in the “first draft” of the world. We enter the novel in the “moment of God standing back,” between this first draft and whatever will come next in the second. My first instinct was to call it a mess—but this actually makes sense, because Heti is attempting to portray to readers a first draft of creation, which is also a mess. The author is capturing the feel of a world that is also filled with idiocy and miracles, at once. While there is a skeleton of a storyline— most of the plot in Pure Colour is filtered through the main character, Mira—the surrealist and philosophical conversations in this novel feel like both a departure for, and distinctly marked as, Heti’s work and captures something true about the times in which we are living.