In this philosophical novel, not to be mistaken for memoir, time and chance conspire to foreclose possibilities, but diminishment is resisted. Heti dilates a thrilling narrative from a binary question: creation or procreation? The book’s horizon is biblical. Debts to the past can only be paid to the future. If you’re descended from a Holocaust survivor, is it nobler to mother children or write books? Heti knows there’s something absurd in asking the question. Her narrator mines a lot of humor and a little sorrow from posing it over and over — to herself, to everyone she meets, and to coins she tosses in the air. The novel provides not answers but a zone of freedom from answers.