I do not think this novel knows everything, but Sheila Heti does know something about how many of us, right now, experience the world, and she has gotten that knowledge down on paper, in a form unlike any other novel I can think of.

The most engaging part of the novel is the platonic, intellectual love affair between Sheila and Margaux and their respective learning and negotiation of how a person should be - and the problems that manifest when a person "is" or "does be." In one such dip in the friendship, Sheila pings off to a creepy male lover, Israel, who sends her instructions for solo public sex performances according to his lobotomized porn menu. Heti's settling of Sheila's ongoing trials with Israel and the place in which she finds herself - between sex positivism and a pervert's manipulations - provides splendid writing and a striking inversion of assumptions about sexual power and where it lies (and how it can be reclaimed).If such a novel sounds like hard work, it's not. If anything, it's not hard enough work. When you go to this extent to invoke and provoke with form, we want challenging content too, so Heti could have gone much further.Mercifully, in such constrained publishing times, what Heti's brain and fingertips offer are expanded possibilities for what the novel can be and can become. She's on her way to something original and bolder. In the meantime, How Should a Person Be? makes curious and combative company.