Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
Published 2022 · 224 pages · 36,949 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Philosophical Fiction, Fable
How hard is Pure Colour to read?
Pure Colour scores 69 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
- Heti writes in plain, contemporary prose without recourse to archaic vocabulary, specialized terminology, or invented language. Words like 'stratosphere,' 'hypotaxis,' or technical jargon never appear — the philosophical weight comes entirely from the ideas, not the lexicon. Readers encounter the same accessible English they would find in a literary magazine essay.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Sentences run from spare declaratives to extended philosophical meditations, but Heti rarely attempts Jamesian hypotaxis or Faulknerian nesting. The long passages — such as the multi-page monologue on 'fixers' and family traditions — are paratactic accumulations rather than syntactically demanding constructions. The grammar is always navigable, even when the thought is not.
- Abstraction: 86 out of 100
- The entire novel operates on an allegorical register where God is reimagined as three art critics (bird, fish, bear), human existence is framed as a 'first draft' awaiting revision, and Mira's grief literally transforms her into a leaf in a tree. Concrete events — a father dying, a love affair with Annie, a burning bungalow — are immediately absorbed into metaphysical frameworks that demand sustained philosophical engagement. This places the abstraction level near Waiting for Godot, though grounded by personal emotional stakes.
- Information density: 75 out of 100
- Nearly every page introduces or deepens a philosophical concept — the nature of God as artist, the taxonomy of bird/fish/bear souls, the mechanics of dying and spirit-transfer — alongside the personal narrative. However, the prose is spare rather than encyclopedic: Heti does not accumulate historical detail or multiply plot lines, so the density is conceptual rather than informational. Closer to Austerlitz than to 2666.
- Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100
- Readers must constantly negotiate the boundary between literal event and sustained metaphor: Mira actually enters a leaf after her father dies, but this is simultaneously grief, identity dissolution, and cosmic allegory. The non-linear chapter numbering (chapters appear in scrambled order) further disorients, requiring readers to construct sequence themselves. Nothing is directly explained — the 'first draft of existence' cosmology arrives as assertion, not exposition.
- Symbolic density: 85 out of 100
- The novel is built entirely on a symbolic scaffold: the bird/fish/bear archetypes govern character and society, 'pure colour' represents a form of ideal aesthetic essence, the leaf embodies post-mortem continuity, the lamp signals humble beauty and loss. Every major object — the lamp, the seashell, the leaf — carries sustained allegorical weight. Closer to To the Lighthouse than to The Waste Land, because the symbols remain attached to felt emotional experience.
- Ironic distance: 38 out of 100
- Heti's authorial stance is earnest and contemplative throughout — she means the cosmology of bird, fish, and bear with full philosophical seriousness, and Mira's grief is rendered without satirical distance. There is no gap between what the text says and what the author intends. The only slight irony appears in the novel's self-awareness that its own premises are outlandish, but even this is offered with sincerity rather than winking detachment.
- Resolution withholding: 82 out of 100
- Mira's love for Annie ends without explanation or reconciliation; the father's death is processed but not resolved; the cosmological framework promises a 'second draft' that never arrives within the novel's pages. The book ends with Mira deciding to return to human life from the leaf — a decision rendered in tentative, conditional terms. The refusal of closure is structural: the 'first draft' framing defines all human existence as inherently incomplete.
- Structural complexity: 78 out of 100
- Chapter numbers appear in scrambled order (chapters labeled Two, Three, Four appear before chapters labeled Eight, Nine, then back to Two again), blending multiple narrative modes — personal memory, cosmic myth, direct-address philosophical essay, dialogue between the dead. The section presenting a long monologue about 'fixers' reads like autonomous found text embedded without attribution. This formal fragmentation, comparable to Flights, demands that readers actively assemble both narrative and argumentative coherence.
How Pure Colour is regarded
Pure Colour holds a literary regard score of 50 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.