Take What You Need by Idra Novey
A devilishly effective narrative schema propels this latest novel from Idra Novey, its chapters alternating between its two compelling protagonists. Leah tells her story in the present, while on an exhausting cross-country drive with her husband and son to visit the home of Jean, her recently deceased stepmother. Meanwhile, the bulk of Jean’s story takes place several years earlier as she works on a series of bizarre metal sculptures in her home (her ‘Manglements’) with the aid of her troubled, young neighbour Elliot. Long-estranged after having left Leah’s father and the family home while Leah was still a child, she reflects on a life lived with that debilitating emptiness at its heart, and the pair’s stories gradually converge in impeccably managed, and deeply satisfying, fashion.
Set in the (fictional) former steel town of Sevlick in the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia, this will, for many readers, be an America they barely know. Deprivation and decay run hand in hand: the shuttered shops in a once-thriving high street; the homeowners replaced by social security renters; in Jean’s words, ‘a nonstop eyeing-and-spying situation. No matter how often a gun went off I couldn’t get used to it.’ With Leah returning to her home town for the first time in four years, and still rattled by the memory of an unsettling encounter with Jean during that visit, the story snakes towards an ending and a reckoning.
Novey, of course, is too generous a writer to plump for absolute neatness of resolution, and instead she offers the reader a more convincing form of closure: one cloaked in possibilities, and built on paths that might have been trodden. Take What You Need speaks eloquently and at length about the trials of a broken nation, the chasms that can open up between people as a result of little more than a misplaced word, and it has much to say about grief — in particular the indistinct form generated in the wake of absence and disconnection. A work of unflinching emotional scrutiny and uncommon artistry, it elevates the modern American novel to new and exhilarating heights.
Take What You Need is published by Daunt Books, 3rd August 2022