FINDING MEANING AND BEAUTY IN RUST BELT DECLINE
A conversation with author Idra Novey
Idra Novey’s inspiration for setting her brilliant third novel, “Take What You Need,” in the fictional town of Sevlick, a town in the Allegheny Highlands a few hours outside of Pittsburgh, was her own Western Pennsylvania upbringing.
Born and raised in Johnstown, Ms. Novey came of age against the backdrop of the city’s catastrophic flood of 1977, which occurred the year before she was born. On walls around town, plaques and faded lines show how high the waters rose; Ms. Novey remembers tracking her own growth against those water marks.
“As a child, I remember thinking, look, I’m almost as tall as the flood line,” she said during a conversation about the inspiration for her new novel. That awareness of the town’s history didn’t just extend to notches on the city’s walls. Ms. Novey’s family have lived in rural Pennsylvania for over a century.
Throughout her career as a writer, Ms. Novey flirted with Pennsylvania as a location. It is, after all, a place Ms. Novey credits with influencing who she is as an artist and the kinds of books she’s drawn to create. An award-winning writer and translator, she has published two previous novels, two collections of poetry, countless short stories and several books in translation. Many of the characters in her previous novels and short stories came from places like Johnstown.
“I wanted to write about people who lived in those towns,” Ms. Novey said. “To find a significant point of connection based on art for people who are on opposite ends of our politically polarized times.”
“Take What You Need” is about the complicated relationship between a stepmother and her stepdaughter. It is also about how art has the power to resurrect a place and a relationship, and to give immortality to an unlikely
protagonist.
That unlikely protagonist is Jean, an older woman who has remained in a town long past its prime. With masterful precision, Ms. Novey conveys what it’s like for Jean to live in a place written off — a town where the steel mills have closed, the homes have fallen into disrepair, and ever-rising crime and violence have formed her world. Those with the means have left; among those long gone is Leah, Jean’s stepdaughter.
At the outset of the novel, we learn that Leah has returned to Sevlick on the heels of Jean’s death. Unsurprisingly, Leah finds that even amidst the inevitable death and neglect of a town, Jean
was able to live and create meaningfully. But this revelation doesn’t arrive without tension. It is within that tension — of fascinating, complicated people who somehow manage to defy assumptions about who and where great art is made –—that Ms. Novey is able to challenge elitism in a most profound way.
Jean is a self-taught sculptor, who learned how to make what she calls “Manglements” — coffin-like metal sculptures she assembles from the scrap gathered at a family scrapyard. Interestingly, the scrapyard comes from Ms. Novey’s own family’s history: Novey’s Scrapyard was founded by the author’s namesake, Ida Novey, in Clearfield a century ago.
“I wanted to include the scrapyard because it’s such a big part of the history of industrial Pennsylvania, “Ms. Novey said.
Some of the most moving moments in the novel emerge from Jean’s meditation on how much beauty can be found in what others consider to be waste. Through Jean’s obsession with resurrecting her own loss and despair in monuments to death and beauty, we see how art itself can transcend the heartbreak of loss.
“I often go back to my hometown,” Ms. Novey said, “and there are so many things I don’t understand. I feel so much anguish about the decline of the town. I’m devastated by how many people I know suffer from unemployment, how many people I went to high school with have died of an overdose. There is a lot of suffering.”
It is Ms. Novey’s preoccupation with her own town’s decline that moved her to tackle what at times felt like a fairytale: a meeting place for those who stand in opposing political sides to find a way to connect. What the novel accomplishes is that but so much more. It affirms through a keen contemplation on aging and womanhood the life of an artist who finds a way to erect works of art that render breathless those willing to pay attention. Much like the novel itself.