Canadian writer Sheila Hetiâs 2010 breakout novel sought to interrogate its titular puzzler, How Should a Person Be? Itâs become a continuing quest, but over the course of a career that now finds her publishing her 12th book, sheâs also asked readers to consider again and again another question: how should prose be? Pairing philosophical inquiry with formal experimentation, sheâs drawn inspiration from sources as scattered as reality TV, the I Ching and chatbot utterances, expanding our thinking about structure, character and the boundaries between fiction and memoir.
Both lines of investigation are furthered in this latest work, her most radical yet. It began when she decided to upload 10 years of her journal writing â 500,000 words in all â to an Excel spreadsheet, which ordered her sentences alphabetically. Then came the editing, a task sheâs worked at, on and off, for more than a decade, winnowing the sentences so that only those she liked best remained.
Alphabetical Diaries takes the reader from A (âA bookâ) to Z (âZadie Smithâs husbandâ) in 25 chapters (she wrote no sentences beginning with an X). Some stretch across many pages â I being by far the longest â while others, such as Q, consist of a single entry: âQuiet days, not seeing people, feeling fine.â In the entire book, thereâs not a single paragraph break.
With context and chronology stripped away, an indexâs methodical anarchy rules. âWhen he calls, what will I do? When I live according to ethics, I donât feel Iâm living honestly. When I looked at the wall, I saw a second moth like the first, its white wings soft and laced with dustâ â so runs a typical string of sentences.
Even so, the frisson derived from accessing anotherâs most intimate scribblings remains, as Heti unselfconsciously shares doubts and desires, regrets, ambitions and jealousies. She questions herself relentlessly â as an observer, a lover, a writer. She travels, yearning always for New York but also spending time in London, Paris, Berlin. She craves company but savours solitariness. Sheâs gossipy, lusting, vain. Throughout, creativity and â often to her own dismay â her appetite for men vie for her attention, but she also spends a fair amount of time tidying up, shopping, worrying about money.
Itâs a text best consumed in long sittings in order for its echoes and serendipities to register, but itâs exciting, too, to be reminded of just how much narrative oomph can be packed into that most basic building block of prose â the sentence. Consider the storytelling potential of this, for instance: âI put the teeth in my pocket.â
Intriguing in theory, Hetiâs structure can of course be off-putting and frustrating in practice. What helps is the energy that the text draws from the tension between the unfiltered nature of its raw material and the artfulness of its paring down. Chapter endings, in particular, feel full of crafty intent and she pays acute attention to rhythm throughout. Her editing sometimes creates sequences that seem to flow, acquiring unintended meaning, along with juxtapositions that can be comic or poetic, sometimes aphoristic. Hence, âMarriage can make misery more bearableâ is followed immediately by the gloomily droll: âMarriage is one step closer to divorce than being in a relationship.â
Across Hetiâs work, the intensity of her intellectual seriousness is matched by playfulness, and this abecedarian assemblage is no exception. As she threads her way through the alphabet, she repeatedly appears to pre-empt every conceivable response to the book. âWhat a load of rubbish all this writing is,â she says towards its close, a short while later asking: âWhat beauty could be made from this randomness?â
Much beauty, is the answer, and not just that either. In embracing lifeâs randomness and so thoroughly disrupting the urge to impose, through prose, order and a sense of the evolving self, she ultimately reveals just how solid our innate characteristics areand how irrepressible narrative can be.