Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

Published 2022 · 224 pages · 36,984 words · about 4 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 48 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.

Where Pure Colour sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (65 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Pure Colour scores 72 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
As soon as she was in the leaf, she knew she had made a mistake. She had wanted to go to a better place, but her spirit got caught in a leaf.
Symbol: Anagogic
After God created the heavens and the earth, he stood back to contemplate creation, like a painter standing back from the canvas.
Mythos: Irony (Fatalistic Phase) v (irony v)
Life was always playing its tricks, never just giving, and never just taking away, but always both.
Genre: Anatomy + Romance
People born from the bird egg are interested in beauty, order, harmony and meaning.

Where the story of Pure Colour takes place

  • Toronto and a small Ontario town, from art-school youth to middle age and death (1995 to 2023), the main setting
  • Harbord Street, Toronto, student days before phones and the web (1990 to 1998)
  • Inside the leaf by the lake, and the afterlife near Saturn
  • The coming second draft of creation

6 things that are true of Pure Colour, with the passage for each

  1. The novel's God splits into three art critics in the sky: a bird, a fish and a bear.

    God appears, splits, and manifests as three art critics in the sky: a large bird who critiques from above, a large fish who critiques from the middle, and a large bear who critiques while cradling in its arms.

  2. Annie lives in an apartment above an occult bookstore on Harbord Street.

    Annie lived in a sprawling apartment above an occult bookstore on Harbord Street, back when it was mostly antiquarian bookshops.

  3. Mira steals her favourite lamp from the lamp store by hiding it by the fire door and carrying it home under her coat.

    Mira took her favourite lamp and hurried with it to the back of the shop and hid it near the fire door

  4. Matty, the school's great hope, dies when his car goes into the water.

    They had found his car in the water, and Matty sitting in his car.

  5. A fire in Mira's rented bungalow leaves her lamp mangled.

    she found her lamp was totally mangled. She let the red and green stones fall through her hands.

  6. Mira sews herself a leaf costume.

    Mira bought some green fabric and some green thread and a silver needle, and she began to sew her costume.

Scenes in Pure Colour that Frye would name

31 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, TWO
the moment the life left his body, and she felt his spirit enter her, and fill her up with joy and light. The father's deathbed scene is the book's central sacrificial pathos, with the spirit passing into the daughter.
Displacement, ONE
They slip into a person like an amoeba, and from within one person, they watch another one—the one they have chosen to watch. The gods work through psychological attraction between two ordinary people, so myth shows through realistic motive.
Anagnorisis, TWO
she realized this bottom truth about the nature of her love, and that there was no bottom below this bottom. Mira recognizes at her father's deathbed that she loves art more than him.
Pathos, NINE
Her entire life was just lying in that bed, her head in Annie’s hands. Mira's own deathbed closes the book with Annie cradling her.
Anatomy, ONE
People born from the bird egg are interested in beauty, order, harmony and meaning. An ideological catalogue sorts all people into three egg types.
Point of epiphany, THREE
which is where some part of her rose up, up, up into a leaf in a tree. The tree and log by the lake where she once sat with her father is where the human and spirit worlds touch.

Books that share these scenes with Pure Colour

About the author

Sheila Heti