Neil Young waged heavy bullshit in a memoir that spent all of a paragraph describing hanging out with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and the Manson family in favor of slinging hundreds of pages of PR copy about the new sound system Mr. Young invented. The masochist in me kind of liked this book, the same way I like the most pointless of Mr. Young’s guitar solos. Passages such as this are the prose equivalent:

A funny thing happened at Woodstock. I didn’t want cameras onstage distracting me while we were playing. I hated the showboating atmosphere that surrounded the filming and thought it distracted from our music. The music was between us and the audience, and anything that got in the way was taboo in my opinion...On the Woodstock record, Atlantic Records used a song of mine recorded months later at the Fillmore East in New York called “Sea of Madness.” That was kind of misleading.

Okay, grandpa. Thanks for lunch, but I really gotta get going now.

Pete Townshend turns out to be a better writer than ol’ shakey—he devotes quite of lot time in his book, Who I Am, to his career as an acquisitions editor at Faber & Faber, a job he took a few years after the death of Who drummer Keith Moon. It’s interesting, but not as interesting as, you know, getting into a fistfight onstage with Keith Moon or throwing televisions out of hotel windows, details that get shortchanged.

Of all the music memoirs this year, my favorite is the one by Rod Stewart, the hilariously-named Rod. Mr. Stewart positions himself as a stately, Evelyn Waugh-esque narrator. (The chapters all have headings like “In which our hero throws in his lot with the damaged remnants of the Small Faces and is reluctantly made alert to the perils of trying to run two careers at once. With sundry meditations on graffiti, Ronnie Wood’s hooter, and the wearing of velvet in hot rooms.”)

The worst book of the year—and possibly of the past several—is Say Nice Things About Detroit by Scott Lasser, an insulting and entirely misguided fictional account of my dear, troubled hometown that manages to make one of the most complicated and evocative places in the world about as interesting as a conference call.

The runner-up was Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie’s third-person memoir of the fatwa issued on him by Ayatollah Khomeini. I took less issue with the author—who lived under the titular pseudonym Joseph Anton during those threatening years—casually placing himself in a lineage with Conrad and Chekhov, as well as comparing his novel to Ulysses and Lolita, than I did with his numerous attacks, almost in the same breath, on the “majestic narcissism” of Padma Lakshmi, his fourth wife, whom he might as well just refer to as “dumb slut.” Mr. Rushdie uses the third person as if it protects him from the offhanded misogyny of his assaults, not to mention his own preposterous self-aggrandizing. There is also prose in the book that makes Top Chef look like Joyce:

His biggest problem, he thought in his most bitter moments, was that he wasn’t dead. If he were dead nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of his security and whether or not he merited such special treatment for so long. He wouldn’t have to fight for the right to get on a plane … He wouldn’t have to talk to any more politicians (big advantage). His exile from India wouldn’t hurt. And the stress level would definitely be lower.

Yes, because the worst thing about having an international hit put on you is that it’s just so stressful.

A superior memoir is A Sense of Direction by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, which includes this description of Berlin: “Cigarettes marked off the time. For the few minutes one lasted, you knew exactly what you were doing: you were smoking that cigarette. When it was done, you would figure out what to do next, or you would just light another.”

Toni Morrison’s uneven novella Home, about an alcoholic veteran of the Korean War trying to rescue his sister from an evil eugenicist, felt both overwritten and unfinished; Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan’s humorless, entirely unsexy novel about Cold War-era British espionage, made Moonraker look smart; and Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her was like a teaser for better things to come.

Of the year’s failures, Zadie Smith’s novel NW was at least a very interesting one. Ms. Smith can make the description of a dumpy office feel dire: “Here offices are boxy cramped Victorian damp. Five people share them, the carpet is threadbare, the hole-punch will never be found.” But the novel is less a narrative than an unwelcoming environment to move around in at random. She bogs down her writing with a disruptive and schizophrenic style.

Speaking of interruptions, Laurent Binet’s HHhH was translated into English this year, and is nominally about Reinhard Heydrich—Hitler’s “Butcher of Prague”—but is much more about the difficulty of trying to write a novel about Reinhard Heydrich, including various William Gass-like digressions from the author himself.

A (slightly) less-tortured historical novel was Hilary Mantel’s very entertaining Bring Up the Bodies, about Thomas Cromwell.

Katherine Boo’s amazing reconstruction of life in an Annawadi slum beat out another of Robert Caro’s minute-to-minute biographies of LBJ for the nonfiction National Book Award. Louise Erdrich deservedly won the NBA for fiction with The Round House, her novel about a violent rape on an Ojibwe reservation, though the award felt like it was retroactively awarding a mostly consistent 25-year career. Let’s not even talk about how there was no Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Metafictional winks—for example, an author naming her protagonist after herself and her supporting cast after her friends—have always seemed dubious to me, so I picked up Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? with apprehension. The book stars Sheila Heti and seemingly includes transcripts of Ms. Heti’s conversations with her real-life friends, though that might be a fictional ruse. Ms. Heti is thoughtful in her exploration of the thin line between fiction and reality, especially in her examination of the ways in which the two bleed together.

Chris Kraus, an antecedent to Ms. Heti, also wrote a small masterpiece this year with a novel about the Los Angeles art world, Summer of Hate.

I can’t think of a better work of nonfiction in 2012 than Mark Binelli’s Detroit City is the Place to Be, an antidote to Scott Lasser’s atrocity. Nothing has come as close to realistically documenting the wackiness of contemporary Detroit. At one point, Mr. Binelli sneaks onto the set of the remake of the communists-are-coming smut movie Red Dawn, which was filmed at the author’s old high school. The city had been plastered with fictional propaganda posters that say things like YOU DESERVE TO BE HERE. Mr. Binelli overhears a crew member talking about how much he loved filming in Detroit: “We were setting off major explosions in the middle of downtown! Seriously, man, there’s nowhere else in the country they’d let you do something like this.”

It was a good year for poetry. Maureen N. McLane (full disclosure: a grad school professor of mine) wrote a brilliant poem-memoir that attempted to answer the question, “Why poetry?” (The answers range from “Poetry is connate with the origin of man” to “I have wasted my life.”) Having Louise Glück’s collected poems in a single volume is a gift. Michael Robbins published the most assured debut I’ve read in a long time. And any year John Ashbery publishes a book is A-okay with me, especially one with the lines, “No one expects life to be a single adventure,/yet conversely, one is surprised when it turns out disappointing.” Also, Frederick Seidel’s Nice Weather included some of the bleakest imagery of the year:

This is what it’s like at the end
    of the day.

But soon the day will go away.

Sunlight preoccupies the cross
    street.

It and night soon will meet.

Meanwhile, there is Central
    Park.

Now the park is getting dark.

Oh, and speaking of bleak, Fifty Shades of Grey saved publishing.

mmiler@observer.com

Philip Roth.

The phrase “it’s better to burn out than to fade away” has been a rallying cry in music since Neil Young crooned it over 30 years ago. But it’s writers who seem to best embody the sentiment: the burnouts who did themselves in, like Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, tend to be romanticized long after their deaths by those who believe an untimely end completes some sort of narrative of depression; the ones who fade, the writers who keep pushing out words till their last breath, may not be eulogized, but at least they get to spend their golden years doing what they (presumably) love.

Last month, Philip Roth, one of America’s greatest living writers and its reigning curmudgeon, took a very different route toward career conclusion: he quit. The 79-year-old author of 27 novels, dozens of short stories and countless essays, and the recipient of nearly every major literary award save the Nobel Prize, told an interviewer for the French publication Les Inrocks, “To tell you the truth, I’m done.” His 2010 novel Nemesis would be his last book.

Surprisingly, it took a month for the American media to pick up on the news that one of its literary lions was putting down his pen. Salon “broke” the news last week by using an Internet program to translate Mr. Roth’s quotes into English. And then things got stranger: there was no big blowout to celebrate a life in letters, no gold watch presented to the retiree, no jersey hung from the rafters. His retirement was a quiet affair—he had done enough, he said, and didn’t want to bang out books anymore. He is one of the rare novelists able to say, “I studied, I taught, I wrote and I read. With the exclusion of almost everything else. Enough is enough!”

But if you’re one of the most acclaimed authors alive, the type who can walk into a bookstore and grab five new works of fiction with a blurb claiming the author is influenced by your work, does it really matter, after all this time, that you want to stop? For most writers, the answer would be no; everybody deserves to call it quits on his own terms, and it’s better to ride into the sunset than to write garbage books simply because you’re a household name. But in the case of Mr. Roth, there is something meaningful in his quiet exit. It closes the door on the Golden Era of Jewish-American Literature.

To say that the postwar era has been good for Jewish writers is an understatement. Jewish-American literature after the Second World War has both changed the course of American letters and helped forge a new, post-Holocaust Jewish identity. Mr. Roth is part of the school of novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists and songwriters that includes Grace Paley, Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Bernard Malamud, Leonard Cohen, Cynthia Ozick, Edward Lewis Wallant, Arthur Miller, Joseph Heller, Leonard Michaels and the Canadian-born, American-raised Saul Bellow, whose opening line to his 1953 breakout novel The Adventures of Augie March is not only of the same iconic stature as Moby-Dick’s “Call me Ishmael” but reads like a rallying cry for Jewish assimilation just a few years removed from Hitler’s massacre: “I am an American, Chicago born.”

In one sense, Mr. Roth’s exit is merely symbolic. The light of the Golden Age has been fading for years—but his announcement is an extinguishing of the embers. In 1977, several years before Mr. Roth had published a single Zuckerman novel, Irving Howe, another of the great Jewish-American intellectual voices, wrote that “American Jewish fiction has probably moved past its high point.” He went on to say that most American Jewish writing up until that point had drawn heavily from the immigrant experience, that it “must suffer a depletion of recourses, a thinning-out of materials and memories.” Howe believed that Jewish writers had become removed from centuries of suffering, and the mother tongue of Yiddish was being forgotten. Mr. Roth himself was the child of first-generation American parents, but the shtetl was never far behind. His earlier writing, along with the work of many of his contemporaries, gives a glimpse into the growing pains of a culture that was finally able to stop worrying about Spanish Inquisitions, pogroms, Hitler.

But Philip Roth’s retirement is significant because he is the Jewish-American writer. His lackluster books from the last decade or so notwithstanding, his body of work represents the most extensive document of the Jewish experience in postwar America. The short story “Defenders of the Faith,” collected in his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959) is about a Jewish soldier who tries to manipulate his sergeant—a fellow Jew—by preying on their shared ethnic backgrounds to keep from getting shipped off to the Pacific. It caused an uproar in the Jewish community for its portrayal of the soldier, Sheldon Grossbart, which many felt upheld the long-standing stereotype that Jews are cunning and greedy. Mr. Roth saw it differently, stating in 1963 that his character was “represented not as the stereotype of the Jew, but the Jew who acts like the stereotype, offering back to his enemies their vision of him[.]”

Six years later came the commercial success of Portnoy’s Complaint, a novel that prompted its own share of controversy. Life magazine pointed to “the book’s pungent language” and “its preoccupations, foremost among which is the terrible sin of onanism.” Alexander Portnoy masturbating with a piece of raw liver was on par with anything Lenny Bruce had thought up. After that book, Mr. Roth churned out at least one great novel in every decade since the release of Goodbye, Columbus. He held up the center of American fiction, Jewish or otherwise.

So what can we expect in his absence? Mr. Roth’s announcement comes at a time when post-Golden Age American Jewish literature is reaching its own awkward adolescence. The compulsive masturbation in Portnoy’s Complaint made subversion the centerpiece of Mr. Roth’s style, and it seems as if today’s younger American-born Jewish writers are trying to one-up his crudeness. The title story of Nathan Englander’s 2012 collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank focuses on two Jewish couples, one Hasidic and the other secular, getting high and drunk and playing the “Anne Frank game”: they try to guess which of their gentile neighbors would hide them in the event of a second Holocaust. The entire book follows Jewish characters transforming from victim to victimizers in a far less subtle way than Sheldon Grossbart in “Defenders of the Faith.” But Mr. Englander’s “Anne Frank game” is tame in comparison with Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy, a novel, also released earlier this year, about an everyday schmuck named Solomon Kugel. In it, our David Kepesh-esque antihero buys a farmhouse and finds, to his surprise, that a woman who claims to be Anne Frank is alive and living in his attic. This is a literary gotcha at least comparable with the absurdity of Mr. Roth’s novella The Breast, in which Kepesh wakes up to discover he has turned into, well, a 155-pound breast.  (An Anne Frank-like character also appears in Mr. Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 novel The Ghost Writer.) But after the initial shock value, the obviousness of Mr. Auslander’s metaphor—that Jews are unable to move past the systematic death of six million of their people—grows stale. Reviews of the book were mixed, but many of them cited Philip Roth as an influence.

So what, exactly, does it mean to be influenced by Philip Roth? His body of work is so diverse that he’s a presence every writer must assimilate and, if successful, live down. Joshua Cohen’s 800-page 2010 novel Witz begins with a Rothian gimmick—the protagonist is the last Jew on Earth after a mysterious plague wipes out the world’s chosen people, making him a bizarre update of the solitary but virile man who inhabits so much of Mr. Roth’s fiction. But from there the book is more concerned with language itself, a stream of consciousness of made-up words and impenetrable sentences; it reads, at times, like a deliberate swipe at what Mr. Roth called, in his 1963 essay “Writing About Jews,” the “promiscuous instincts” of modern man.

Stepping away from his more obvious descendants, it becomes clear how inescapable Mr. Roth’s style has become. At a glance, Sheila Heti, a Canadian of Hungarian-Jewish descent, whose most recent novel, How Should a Person Be?, includes, more than once, the decidedly anti-Rothian dismissal “just another man who wants to teach me something,” does not seem a likely candidate for inheriting Mr. Roth’s mantle. But her book is filled, even unconsciously, with Rothian gestures. First, there’s the graphic sex. Consider the two writers’ dueling takes on fellatio. Mr. Roth, from My Life As a Man: “Her eyes leveled on his exposed member and her tongue out and moving. ‘I want to be your whore,’ she whispered to him (without prompting too), while on the back terrace her Mother told his mother how adorable Sharon looked in the winter coat they’d bought for her that afternoon.” Ms. Heti: “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.” Then there is the blurring of fiction and autobiography, a theme that haunts many contemporary novelists. “Sheila Heti” is the protagonist of How Should a Person Be?, just as “Philip Roth” is the hero of The Plot Against America, navigating the halls of Weequahic High School, where the real Philip Roth got a diploma.

The reviews of Ms. Heti’s novel—and there were plenty—did not lump her into this tricky category of Jewish Fiction, and certainly didn’t mention Mr. Roth, whose impress ranges from obvious to subliminal in most contemporary fiction. There is still a lingering obsession with what makes a Jewish writer or a Jewish book—an idea that Mr. Roth helped form—but his exit from the literary world certainly puts an end to the era of the Jewish Writer as we know it. He may not have been as well known without the visibility awarded to a Jew writing about Jews in the years after World War II, but as a lesson to anybody who tries to label himself or herself a Jewish Writer in these post-Roth years, Mr. Roth’s work will be remembered for its quality first. Perhaps this is his greatest achievement. He made Jewish fiction mainstream, allowing Jewish writers to focus on something other than just being Jewish.

editorial@observer.com

Ms. Heti.

Imagine for a moment that an infant alien blob has oozed its way into the Columbus Circle subway station and through a miraculous process of osmosis managed to absorb the most important material from a rack of women’s magazines. The blob would have a lot of direction about how a person should be. It would have a repertoire of 10 Things to Do With Mason Jars and know how to “upcycle” things. It would know how to execute the “G Spot Jiggy” and have some useful suggestions about what to wear to a wedding. But then something terrible would happen: for the rest of its life, from having received an injection of Seventeen, Readymade and Elle in a formative moment, the abiogenetic marvel that was the alien blob would experience the constant assault of dubious information flitting through its organ of reasoning. As it blobbed about it would never be able to forget the minimum Sun Protection Factor to wear out of doors, even in winter. When it squeezed its pimples it would be forced to recall from the magazines that pimples should never be squeezed. Thus besieged with all it knew of how to be, and aware of its consistent failure to fulfill even the simple mandates of some listicles, the alien would despair.

Something similar can happen to women. In her new novel, How Should A Person Be?  (Henry Holt, 320 pp., $25) Sheila Heti tries to address this. In her title, the tyrannical confidence of women’s magazines and self-help guides is subverted in the interrogative form. Ms. Heti uses her novel to express her frustration with the female obsession with the question of the proper way to be. The literature of self-improvement, under the guise of offering instruction for happiness and overwhelmingly coded as female, instead serves too frequently as a reminder of ineptitude. “There are certain people who do not feel like they were raised by wolves, and they are the ones who make the world tick,” writes a facetious Ms. Heti. She ponders the plight of the rest, with their appetite for more guidance and advice: How should a person pack her suitcase? What should a person eat? Who should a person marry?

Ms. Heti decides the search for such models is a waste of time. As one character puts it, “The only thing I ever understood is that everyone should make the big mistakes.” Along with the endless consumption of instruction, female friendship is marred by the problem of mimicry. Sex is presented as something that can be carefully managed. When Ms. Heti’s narrator decides to work on perfecting her blowjob technique instead of her writing, the metaphor is clear: when the quest for instruction and expertise overtakes production,the result is merely “an age of some really great blowjob artists.” The premise of female uncertainty validates paternal advice; “just another man who wanted to teach me something,” is a frequent dismissal in this novel.

The narrator of How Should a Person Be? is a playwright named Sheila who married and then divorced while still young. Before she gets married, “Commitment looked so beautiful to me, like everything I wanted to be: consistent, wise, loving, and true,” she writes. “So I thought about marriage day and night. And I went for it like a cripple goes for a cane.” Now that marriage has failed to make her the person she hoped she would be, Sheila has to find a new model.

During her marriage, a theater commissioned Sheila to write a play. The play did not have to be feminist, but it did have to be about women.  The imperative to describe a female experience is a problem for Sheila, who has always preferred male attention and never sought out female friends. “I didn’t know anything about women! And yet I hoped that I could write it, being a woman myself,” she explains. Sheila takes the commission for the money and hopes for the best, but her divorce provokes a crisis. The first draft of her play, which she wrote while still married, no longer makes sense to her.

Beset by uncertainty, Sheila goes to work as a shampoo girl for a hair salon and tries not to think about the extent of her procrastination. She also befriends a painter named Margaux, who never has trouble working. Sheila, who worries about the vanity implicit in writing, admires Margaux’s work ethic and humility. Now that marriage has failed her, she decides that Margaux might present a new model of how to be.

Margaux worked harder at art and was more skeptical of its effects than any artist I knew. Though she was happier in her studio than anywhere else, I never heard her claim that painting mattered. She hoped it could be meaningful, but had her doubts, so worked doubly hard to make her choice of being a painter as meaningful as it could be.

To figure out how to be, and also to gather material for her play, Sheila begins tape-recording Margaux. “I thought maybe you could help me figure out why it isn’t working,” she says to Margaux about the play. “Then I can listen to what we say, and think it over at home, and figure out where I’m going wrong.”  Interstitial scenes of these conversations, as well as conversations Sheila has with other characters, are interspersed throughout the book in script form, along with stage directions that describe Sheila’s reactions—or that perhaps serve to tell her how to react, and how to be: “They laugh,” or “Sheila starts idly leafing through a pile of papers, junk, and books,” or “Margaux picks up a thing of jam.”

This self-conscious and neurotic depiction of the creative process will feel a little familiar to readers of contemporary fiction. Like the narrators of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, Tao Lin’s Shoplifting at American Apparel and Keith Gessen’s All The Sad Young Literary Men, Sheila wanders here and there, doing drugs, going to parties, thinking about the value of the work she and her friends produce and hoping for some kind of fame. Unlike those books, the semi-autobiographical nature of the novel is explicitly acknowledged here, with the subtitle “a novel from life.” In a further complication, Sheila Heti has published her own version of a self-help book, The Chairs Are Where the People Go, co-written with her friend Misha Glouberman, whom Heti also tape-recorded in that book and who here appears as the character Misha Glouberman, Margaux’s boyfriend.

Ms. Heti’s prose is filled with exclamation points that do not always provide the ballast lacking in certain revelations. Adverbs like “old-fashionedly,” descriptions like the aforementioned “thing of jam” and “a fancy blue hotel” and “a bunch of people were at the airport,” give her voice a faux naïveté that betrays the strength of her observations and assures that her exploration of the lives of female artists falls short of a standard of description set by Doris Lessing in The Golden Notebook or Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar.

But two things set this novel apart from the contemporary, male-dominated milieu: the first is the depiction of Sheila and Margaux’s friendship, with all its complication, insecurity and the positive things that result from mutual female discomfort. Margaux is like all of the characters in The Wizard of Oz wrapped up in one. “I admired her courage, her heart, and her brain,” writes Ms. Heti. But: “I envied the freedom I suspected in her, and wanted to know it better, and become that way too.”

The second is the charged sex Sheila enjoys with a man named Israel. “I don’t know why all of you just sit in libraries when you could be fucked by Israel,” she writes, addressing her readers directly. “I don’t know why all of you are reading books when you could be getting reamed by Israel, spat on, beaten up against the headboard—with every jab, your head battered into the headboard. Why are you all reading?” Sheila mocks her readers’ illusions that the chaos and vulnerability of sex can be effectively avoided by following certain rules (or The Rules). How Should a Person Be? might be the book you give to a friend when she tells you she is going to “date myself” for six months, or announces her departure for Kripalu. Sometimes drastic recalibration of one’s life is necessary—if you’re an addict, say, or starting over after a physically abusive relationship—but too many campaigns of self-reinvention are rooted in unnecessary recrimination. After getting in a fight with Margaux, Sheila embarks on a doomed crusade to New York and leaves Israel. When she tells him that she is leaving town to focus on writing her play, he mocks the pretense they both know to be false: “I hope you write until your fucking fingers break,” he says. Their relationship concludes in a chapter called “Destiny is the Smashing of the Idols.”

The limitation of resolutions to be better, more organized or kinder is best demonstrated in the book when Margaux and another artist character, Sholem, hold a contest to see who can make the uglier painting. The male character, Sholem, successfully renders a painting so ugly it makes him want to die. But the female artist, Margaux, reveals that the intention toward beauty or ugliness can effectively change very little. “I thought, I’ll just do it instinctually, and the same thing came out!” she exclaims. A slightly glum Sholem agrees: “Even though you said you wanted to make this really awful thing, your strength is still in there.”

 editorial@observer.com

The narrator is a female playwright obsessed with becoming a world-renowned genius. It's still a distant goal, but, she says, one good thing about being a woman is that there aren't many examples of female geniuses yet. For all we know, she could be one! In the meantime, she says, "I just do what I can not to gag too much."

The story's author, Sheila Heti, knows a little bit about renown. Her likeness can be found on a poster promoting Canada's brightest literary talents, which circulated a few years ago. She is plainly the youngest, mugging in a cloche, two down from Margaret Atwood.

But, like her fictional counterpart, Sheila Heti is having some trouble with the rest of the world, a fact hinted at by her contributor bio in the back of n+1: "Sheila Heti's novel How Should a Person Be?, excerpted in this issue, was published in Canada in October by House of Anansi. It does not yet at have a US publisher."

And despite the n+1 appearance, Heti told The Observer on the phone from Toronto, she's still looking.  

How Should A Person Be? has been turned down by at least six American publishers. That's no reason to give up hope. Times 2010 Notable Books author Sam Lipsyte's second novel Homeland was memorably rejected by more than 20 editors before being published in the UK and, eventually, the US.

Heti's predicament has raised eyebrows given that her first novel Ticknor was published in the US by the prestigious Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), where it was acquired by current Paris Review editor Lorin Stein. Ticknor has found its way on to at least one college syllabus, alongside works by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roberto Bolaño, and Heti's byline has turned up in bookish publications like McSweeney's (whose publishing arm put out her first book of stories), The Believer, Bookforum and n+1.

Moreover, Heti has sold other books since she began shopping around How Should a Person Be? in 2008. Next year Faber & Faber, an imprint of FSG, will publish a volume of essays by Heti and friend Misha Glouberman. McSweeney's will publish her children's book around the same time. Another thing that might be expected to work in her favor: She is an attractive young woman writing about sex.

"What is it about How Should A Person Be?" Heti asked, clicking audibly through her e-mail. She read snippets of rejections rapid-fire, without attributing them. One editor enjoyed reading it but didn't find the story line compelling enough. One informed her that people "don't talk like that in New York." Another wanted one character's presence amplified. Yet another didn't think he could sell a book about not being able to finish a play.

"It's not just about not being able to finish a play!"

How Should a Person Be? is a novel about a woman in her late twenties living in Toronto, trying to figure out how make art (she's working on a play commissioned by a feminist theater) and, more important, how to be an artist. The other main character is the playwright's best friend, a painter, who is more at ease in the making and less preoccupied with the being. Unable to make the play come together, the protagonist, also named Sheila, displaces her aesthetic ambitions into giving perfect haircuts and performing perfect oral sex.

"It just doesn't make sense to me because I think How Should a Person Be? is so easy," the author said.

Heti has already written her "difficult" novel. Ticknor is a rigorous first-person meditation on jealousy written from the fictional perspective of the real-life biographer of a real-life historian. According to The Library Journal it's "not really a novel at all but rather an extended prose poem... [that] will appeal mainly to writers and critics interested in literary experimentation, rather than general readers looking for a satisfying yarn."

Ticknor's high-brow success does not translate into wholesale industry confidence. Stein said that although he admires Heti's experimental bent, it is not the most direct route to bound copies. "If you're familiar with Sheila's writing, you know she's always trying new things. Some writers are really interested in deepening one channel and--if you can generalize--those writers can be easier to publish, book after book," Stein said.

It was wise, therefore, for Sam Lipsyte to follow up Homeland (after it finally found a publisher) with The Ask, another funny look at an overeducated and understimulated man in early middle age coming to terms with his mediocrity.

The new thing Heti tries in How Should a Person Be? is actually "easy" (perhaps even a "satisfying yarn"), but there are ways in which it is not like most novels. It is fiction, but the characters are the author and her Google-able friends. The plot advances through long stretches of transcribed dialogue, conversations about painting recorded for use in the narrator's unfinished play. Dreams, fantasies, and Jungian therapy sessions are dutifully documented.

It's not hard to imagine some critics (perhaps the older ones) diagnosing it as a work of generational narcissism.

But anyone who has ever experienced something, documented the experience, and then narrated and shared the document--that is, anyone who has made a Facebook photo album--will feel relieved to see this mediated, semi-public way of life reproduced in literature.

"Before I was twenty-five, I never had any friends, but the friends I have now interest me non-stop. Margaux paints my picture and I record what she is saying. We do whatever we can to make the other one feel famous," the narrator says.

Stein recalled that during their discussions of an early draft, Heti recommended he watch the MTV series The Hills to get a better sense of what she was trying to capture.

"It did help me understand something about the novel, but it didn't bring me any closer to a publishing plan at Farrar, Straus and Giroux," Stein said. He ended up passing on the book, although both he and Heti say it has since changed shape significantly.

Unlike the stars of The Hills, who are so boring their allure is Brechtian, Heti's characters reflect a novelist's skill for empathy-wrangling. Sheila grapples with the consequences of using self-documentation as a means to fame, as it threatens to destroy the imperfect life she does have.

A week after Sheila buys the same dress as her best friend Margaux, Margaux e-mails Sheila: "when you said that you'd only wear it out of town and never in toronto, it sort of seemed reasonable, but not really, since of course we only exist in pictures." They then stop talking.
Margaux and Sheila's relationship is more cerebral than the girl-power friendships that typically send books into Oprah's Book Club and up bestseller charts. Margaux writes Sheila philosophical e-mails about "this new freedom of letting my words be separate from my body and become a different person." Sheila knows Margaux is upset with her based on how Margaux represents herself in a painting.

"For me, reading it as a man, it gave me new insight into the life of female artists that didn't look like the cliches," said Mark Greif, the n+1 editor who solicited and edited Heti for excerpt.
In fact, men are remarkably absent from Sheila and Margaux's dynamic. It is a rare work of fiction that passes the Bechdel test: 1. It has more than one female character, 2. the female characters talk to each other, and 3. the female characters talk to each other about something other than men. Sheila never tells Margaux about the blow jobs.

"One thing that could be threatening to publishers is that the sex is so frank--one scene in particular is really a masterpiece--but it doesn't dominate the narrative," Greif said. Heti said that she was delighted when a reader compared the book to Henry Miller, but as Greif points out, it's not a sex memoir, the sex is just a feature.

Most of the men Greif has asked to read the book thought it was a positive experience, but one said that "the sheer honesty of the sex scenes made him want to get in bed, pull the covers over his head and never come out."

"In a male-dominated culture of literature, I do worry about that," he said.

The art critic Dave Hickey, whom Heti interviewed for The Believer, agreed.

"Jonathan Franzen can get away with things Sheila can't because he's a boy," Hickey said. "Getting a blow job is different from giving one."

One reason it's tempting to blame sexism for the book's struggles is that the selection process in book publishing is so opaque. Editor, agent, and author walk away from each rejection with a different account of what has transpired. Doublespeak is prevalent; talking to the press could threaten personal and professional relationships.

"It doesn't usually end well," one editor sighed as he declined to comment on why he did not publish How Should a Person Be?

Lorin Stein reminded The Observer that books have to play dual roles; they are aesthetic objects and commodities. Publishing houses haunted by bottom lines and lay-offs don't have the luxury of cheering on new genius as loudly as risk-taking literary magazines do.

"If I had a publishing house, the first thing I would do is publish How Should a Person Be?," Greif said. "If a book like this, that is so visibly of our moment, can't be published in America, it makes me wonder, what do we even bother with literature for?"

Even if New York publishing decides its female genius doesn't look like Sheila Heti, don't expect her to resort to writing more marketable books the way her fictional counterpart resorted to lesser arts.

"You give someone a blow job to give them pleasure, and if it doesn't give pleasure, it fails. A novel, it seems to me, ought to be a faithful representation of how that artist sees the world, and this worldview may give pleasure or it may not," she wrote in an e-mail.

"Every book has its own life, and I'm sure that the people who could get something out of reading this book will end up reading it."

How Should a Person Be? is available at Amazon Canada and an excerpt is available for free at the website of n+1.