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Book Review

‘How Should a Person Be?’ by Sheila Heti

By Christopher Boucher

 |  Globe Correspondent  

  June 15, 2012

An artist’s task “is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions,” the writer Donald Barthelme once said. “The search is for a question that will generate light and heat.” By that yardstick, Sheila Heti’s new novel, “How Should a Person Be?,’’ is a perfect summer read. In its own way, it’s as bright and hot as the Cape Cod coast in August; it’s also one of the bravest, strangest, most original novels I’ve read this year.

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