In pursuit of transcendence in a grounded world
Sixty-four year old Jean, protagonist of Johnstown-native Idra Novey’s recent novel, “Take What You Need,” is willing to die in pursuit of transcendence. This will no doubt keep reader’s attention as Ms. Novey’s third novel, set in fictional Sevlick, a struggling Rust-Belt town nestled in “the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia,” cares deeply about balancing survival and self-actualization.
Jean’s energy brims as Ms. Novey uses flashbacks to tell her story through chapters that alternate between her POV and that of her estranged stepdaughter, Leah. Characterized as equal parts brassy and socially awkward, when Jean hilariously refers to her taciturn neighbor Elliot by his last name, “Hounslow,” it feels like she’s channeling a scolding Katherine Hepburn.
If Jean’s motivations rest in trying to overcome a lifetime of male-chauvinist obstacles laid out by a hard-edged father as well as ex-husband, Dave, who’d “put me down all day and then crawl on top of me at night,” it’s all that easier to root for her.
What becomes her obsession, fueled by the writings and room-sized sculptures of the artist Louise Bourgeois, is her own attempts at shaping sheet-metal into art, constructed using her father’s welding tools in the Paton Street house that was once her parent’s. The sculptures, dubbed, “Manglements,” by Jean, will take on a life of their own.
These towers are described by Leah as “immense piles of metal cubes … tarnished metal spikes jut out of the side … covered with brightly painted sayings … nearly reaching the ceiling.” The phrases painted in “caboose red” add to the artwork’s personality and allow Leah to share that they bring “Jean’s voice so immediately alive that my face feels hot reading it.” It also allows the audience to know that Jean, a retiree from the local hospital, is a neophyte, selftaught through YouTube videos and a subscription to Artforum, yet also inspired by the artist Agnes Martin.
Jean’s surprising partner-in-crime, Elliot, the new neighbor, is a twentysomething sent to Jean by his mother to fill up plastic jugs of water from the spigot after his family’s water has been turned off. Ms. Novey describes him having, “the curved posture of someone accustomed to bracing for humiliation … of average height and scrawny, with a pale, square face and a thin scar that ran from the right edge of his chin clear up through his lower lip. His brown eyes sat a little too close to his nose.”
Jean is strangely attracted to the energy and strength of this young man, seeing that he has a “gift” as well. He is a fellow soul who saw “a sculpture” in the bases of scrapped barber chairs, someone with the willingness to make art, an “urge that will keep you alive” in the enthusiastic words of Jean.
Elliot’s role, and that of the rundown houses on Paton Street, is to play stand-in for the plucky and redeemable folks left to their own devices in Rust-Belt towns that capitalism forgot, with the coming 2016 Trumpian tidal wave foreshadowed throughout the novel.
Jean’s counterpoint and stepdaughter, Leah, is from NYC and married to a Latino, a setup that feels overplayed at times, especially when she’s berated by a Sevlick local for speaking in Spanish. Still, Leah feels geographically lost when returning to a region she grew up around, and her confusion allows Ms. Novey to fill in backstory through Leah’s childhood memories: The loving edge in Jean’s voice played just right when she recalls their splashing in a secluded creek and then going to Long John Silver’s for hush puppies and fish planks.
That Leah will be haunted by her stepmom’s legacy and art seems foregone. And it’s in the final chapter where she comes to the realization that finding a home for Jean’s sculptures will become her way of grieving.
Idra Novey’s “Take What You Need” is sure to lend readers perspective on living life to the fullest and accepting one’s life as valid, summed best in the book’s Louise Bourgeois epigram: “Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.”