Take What You Need by Idra Novey book review

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Idra Novey’s third novel, “Take What You Need,” opens with a striking line: “This morning, I read that repeating the name of the deceased can quiet the mind when grieving for a complicated person.” That reflection comes from Leah, a 30-something translator, as she drives with her husband and small son through the impoverished Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania. They are headed for the derelict home of Leah’s late stepmother, Jean — a renegade sculptor of abstract metal towers and odd found objects, all crowded into her shabby living room. It seems Jean suffered a fatal fall during the making of the tallest one.

Dubbing it “this odd fairy tale death,” Leah’s traveling to view those towers — left to her by Jean — and to decide what to do with them.

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In alternating chapters, Jean and Leah tell their respective stories. It’s a satisfying structure, allowing us to seep by turns into their voices and worlds. What may mark this novel out as unusual, even rogue, is its focus on two starkly distinct women from two generations who’ve fought bravely for what they managed to gain: Leah forging her escape from what might have been a dead-end life; Jean’s fierce and lonely struggle to make art while living at the bottom of the economy.

Novey’s prose, brisk and direct, tacks back and forth in time. We learn that Jean had been a loving stepmother to Leah before leaving Leah’s father (a jerk) when Leah was 10; that he forbade Jean all personal contact with the girl; that Leah, wounded and baffled, assumed Jean’s silence a deliberate choice to ignore her; that as the girl matured — after some “phases of calling [Jean] up, seeking her contrarian take on things” — Leah stopped all contact with Jean.

Something caused that cutoff — but it’s not spelled out until later.

Meantime, we learn about life in a ghettoized town, about welding — and about unlikely eroticism. Jean lives in her cantankerous late father’s house, near a Section 8 zone of abandoned or condemned homes. Hard-bitten locals work terrible jobs (when any job can be found) for lousy pay or for “a degrading mix of cash and unsaleable goods.” Gunfire peppers the wee hours.

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Jean lives on coffee and stale pretzels while flinging herself into the sculptures she affectionately calls “Manglements.” Untutored except by art magazines, YouTube and the writings of personal gods — sculptor Louise Bourgeois and painter Agnes Martin — she teaches herself: “I was just trying to master the nature of a box. Everything I made was flat and six-sided.” She’s amused by her obsession’s effect on letter carriers and neighbors who must wonder “why I wasn’t out crouching in a flower bed, where women my age were supposed to work out their fading beauty.”

Bourgeois’s and Martin’s iconoclast spirits give Jean courage (despite grisly injuries) to push on: “No real art, Bourgeois said, was possible without a fight with one’s material … You have to become more than yourself is what Louise said when she passed sixty-five, the station on the life train coming up for me as well.” And: “Agnes [said] a real artist has to be able to fail and fail and still go on.” These urgings will light up in neon for artists of all media. But: romantics? Seek elsewhere. This path is harsh.

When Elliott, the neighbor’s lonely young adult son, shows up to fill jugs of water from Jean’s outdoor spigot (his home’s water stopped for lack of payment) the two form a strange, queasy bond. She asks his help lifting metal pieces after deciding he “seemed to have a calm demeanor.” He also smells awful. Jean offers him a shower, and, though the young man is practically feral, allows herself silent fantasies about his body. While actual sex won’t happen, the unresolved eroticism anguishes both. Yet Elliott instinctively respects her work: Their ragged bond persists.

Review: ‘Those Who Knew’ by Idra Novey

Leah’s interim life has trekked from college to Peru where she has lived, worked and married. Missing being mothered has driven her to cultivate her Spanish skills, after a college counselor hints that “focusing on a new syntax of any kind could become an escape hatch into new habits of mind.” Though Leah has steered her life “a hemisphere away from the Allegheny Mountains,” her thoughts still drift to Jean. She is torn, missing Jean while seething over the incident that estranged them — which we learn involves the only other human who matters to Jean: Elliott.

Novey transports us toward two reckonings: what exactly happened to estrange the women — and later, how Leah will respond to Jean’s legacy of sculptures. Both narratives resonate; each a kind of parable of how women have had to invent themselves in flight. But it is particularly Jean’s voice — her raw drive, with no speck of self-pity, to make work against wretched odds — that haunts the mind long after reading “Take What You Need.” In a sense, the novel fulfills its first line’s proposition: as an incantation of an artist’s name and, by implication, an artist’s way.

Joan Frank’s latest books are “Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading” and “Juniper Street: a Novel.”

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