I generally make it a policy to read any book that people say is being misunderstood by smart, serious men, so Sheila Heti’s much-discussed How Should a Person Be? has been on my list for a while.

The book, which is described as “a novel from life” and is based on recorded conversations and emails between Heti and her actual friends, is about a character named Sheila leaving her marriage, having some intense sex, trying to finish a play commissioned by a feminist theater, and searching relentlessly trying to answer the most lofty of philosophical questions: “How should a person be?”

Above all, though, it’s about Sheila becoming friends with Margaux, an artist who, like Sheila, had “never had ...