Pure Colour

The novel opens with a cosmological fable. God steps back from creation like a painter contemplating a first draft; this pause constitutes all of human history. The earth is heating up as God prepares to destroy this attempt and begin again. To critique creation, God splits into three cosmic art critics: a bird, a fish, and a bear. All humans are born from one of these eggs. Bird people value beauty and meaning; fish people care about justice and collective conditions; bear people clutch a few loved ones close and protect them fiercely. The story concerns Mira, a birdlike woman torn between her love for Annie, a mysterious fishlike woman, and her love for her father, a warm bear.

Mira leaves home, takes a job at a Tiffany lamp store, and rents a room in a shared house, choosing solitude so she can hear herself thinking. She becomes fixated on the store's least expensive lamp, a half-oval shade of green and red polished glass stones held together by iron. One day she steals it, carrying it home beneath her coat, and sits before it in the dark, loving her meagre existence.

She enters the American Academy of American Critics, a competitive school where aspiring critics see themselves as elected to shape the future of thought. Among them is Matty, the school's brightest talent. Their professor, Albert Wolff, lectures dismissively on a Manet painting, declaring the painter has an eye but no hand. Mira feels an exquisite quivering before the painting but grows ashamed at the gap between Wolff's dismissal and her own response.

The students already know of Annie and are thrilled she exists. When Matty encounters her in a park, they arrange to visit her apartment above an occult bookstore. Annie grew up in an orphanage, which gives her an independence the students only pretend to have. Hoping to distinguish herself in Annie's eyes, Mira invites Annie to dinner at the house she shares with classmates. The evening becomes a source of shame: As soon as Annie enters, Mira sees her own life as juvenile through Annie's eyes. Annie does not smile and leaves early.

Each time Mira and Annie encounter each other afterward, something widens in both their chests, a portal opening of its own accord. One evening, Mira impulsively kisses Annie on the neck and experiences an unprecedented silence in her heart. Annie never mentions the kiss, and Mira never brings it up. Months later, Annie places a photograph inscribed "For Mira" (50) in a borrowed book, but Mira does not discover it until years later.

Throughout this period, Mira's relationship with her father is a complicated force. She recalls a golden childhood in which he pointed out the world's beauty. As she grew older, any interest in another person felt like a theft from him, since he had no one else to love. His closeness became suffocating, though also comforting, and once on her own, Mira craves the democratic coolness of fish rather than the overwhelming warmth of bears. The group dissolves when Matty marries, and Mira reflects with regret that she should have spent that time with her father.

Part Two opens with her father's death. Mira is present as the life leaves his body, and she feels his spirit enter her through her chest, a warmth and light filling her from skull to toes. About 20 minutes later, a deep chill overtakes her, and she returns to lie beside his body, uncertain whether his spirit has left. When the doctor offers condolences, Mira nearly laughs, because what she has experienced does not feel like loss. Lying beside him, she recognizes a bottom truth: Art and literature mattered to her most, more even than her father. She sees this as the reason she was never the daughter he wanted. In the weeks that follow, his spirit lingers inside her like a fox, filling her deficiencies with patience, perspective, and joy.

In Part Three, Mira returns to the lake where she once sat with her father and enters the cold water. Her spirit rises into a leaf on a nearby tree, and she immediately knows she has made a mistake: Her spirit, which she believed was huge, fits within a single leaf. Her father's spirit is there too. They converse about consciousness, God, and death. Her father tells her the loving part of a person endures while the rest dies, and warns against "fixers," people who meddle with family structure. When Annie appears at the lake and tells a companion a parable about two swans, one representing the body and one communal life, Mira understands she was wrong to follow her father into death. She screams for Annie until a square of light breaks the leaf open and she falls out.

In Part Four, Annie draws Mira back into human life. Over chocolates, Annie explains that she noticed Mira had been "in a leaf," green and still, and brought her back by speaking close to the leaf. Annie, who grew up parentless, recognized when Mira had gone out too far and helped wind up the string of her story.

Part Five meditates on living in the first draft of existence, comparing it to a first love: painful and wrong, but possessing something a mature love does not.

In Part Six, Mira is in middle age, working in a jewellery store, gazing at gemstone rings as she once gazed at lamps. She learns Matty has died in a car accident; his obituary reveals he had been a bear all along, working in his father-in-law's hardware store. The narrator reflects that midlife strips people so the gods can see them more clearly. Mira recognizes that during the week her father was dying, the gods inside him were watching her, and she saw her truest self: She had loved art more than her father. She thinks that perhaps, now that he is dead, she can marry him, and immediately goes into a leaf. Annie draws her out again.

In Part Seven, Mira drives to the town where Annie works as a "fixer," helping groups repair collective delusions. She warns Annie that fixing is wrong, but Annie counters that Mira absorbed her wisdom while trapped with her bear father: The word is not "family" but "familiars," the people one is put on earth to find. They argue until midnight. Afterward, Mira realizes her true motive was wanting Annie to admit she loved her.

A fire destroys Mira's bungalow, and a fireman steps on her lamp, crushing it. She decides to become a leaf, to look at the world only to love it, and sews a leaf costume from green fabric. She visits Annie wearing it, but Annie leads her to the door and calls out, "You should change!" (201). Mira wonders whether Annie means the costume or who Mira is. She moves away, stripped of her hope of something lasting with Annie.

In Part Eight, Mira returns to the lake and finds an ancient seashell that reassures her: Her remorse stems from a critical impulse, not from having caused the world's problems. She keeps it on her vanity, recognizing it as the true shape of a human self: not a beautiful lamp or a ring with a dent, but a battered thing made to endure. She goes about her ordinary days, buying pears and walking down steep hills with her feet turned sideways, the way her father taught her.

In Part Nine, Mira is dying. Annie arrives and pulls Mira into her arms, hoisting her into bed and cradling her head. Mira thinks perhaps Annie does love her, even if Annie could never know it. Being held was what Mira always wanted. As the spirit leaves her body, a last stretch of blue light comes through the window, and her life contracts to this single moment. Something reawakens in the soul of her father: Everything on earth is forgiven. He was not a bad father, and she was not a bad child. The novel closes with a bedtime scene between father and young daughter: good-night, a glass of water, and Mira's request for a story about a bird named Mira, a beautiful fish friend, and a bear father who all live together forever. They exchange "I love you," and he heads downstairs.