This bit of brilliance by friend-of-a-friend Sheila Heti is my vote for Novel of the Year/Novel of the Future/Novel of my Dreams. “How Should a Person Be” is radical. It is fiction that does not feel like fiction. It is a novel without a boring character, a boring climax, even a boring moment. It is a story of girl friends (not lovers, not frenemies, but true friends) and art and sex and marriage and ugliness– all pointing to the question of our generation, How should we be? Dave Hickey, my cheerleader and the resident genius of the state of New Mexico, says with some authority that Sheila Heti is the rock-star of the new writing, and I believe it. Buy this for your artist-in-crisis best friend, and in the card write, “See, it’s fucking hard for everyone.”