Take What You Mean
Reading Idra Novey's new novel
“What else made the soul ring as loudly as remaking the shape of something that doesn’t want to give, having a tool in your hand powerful enough to melt some ugly piece of junk metal down so fast you could see it happen, the little puddle of silver liquid where there had been solid metal a minute before?”
Jean lives in the Allegheny mountains of Appalachia, living a life deferred. An ambivalent clerical worker, her Artforum subscription was a portal into another life. Later she became a wife, but it was becoming a stepmother than changed her life. That unexpectedly loving bond wasn’t enough to save her marriage so after divorce, she settled into her late parents’ house, unemployed and estranged from most everyone but most importantly her stepdaughter Leah. It was a loss that neither could wrap their arms around.
Times were hard in Sevlick, her hometown, then harder as neighbors lost jobs and homes. Shots rang in the night and people became increasingly transient, succumbing to addiction and the opioid of populist fascism. Against this backdrop, of and from the landscape, but always independent, Jean became an artist. She built off her rudimentary knowledge of welding by teaching herself thanks to YouTube videos. She called her towers, made of sheet metal and found objects, Manglements. They were wrought from an act of sheer will, the ache of loss, and enduring love—as well as a complicated friendship.
Elliott was a young adult, doomed to be a drifter through no fault of his own thanks to an unfortunate encounter with the law. Wrong place, wrong time. And yet, through the serendipity or meeting Jean, he found a soul willing to meet him as he was. A friendship forged through varied needs, the two became artist and apprentice of a kind. Misfits in a town left behind. They share a certain rootlessness and inability to connect fully with others. Their relationship could be a cliche, but it skirts that edge and backs away. Instead, it’s a truly unique friendship that kept me reading to see where it would lead them.
The book toggles back and forth between Jean’s narrative and Leah’s. These narratives straddle time as well. At the book’s opening we learn that Jean has died in an accident at home while working on her art. When Elliott reaches out to Leah, he does so to offer not only the sad news of her passing, but to also offer what the reader hopes across the course of the novel will be a lifeline: Jean’s art. Leah had never known about it.
So after years of silence with her husband and young son in tow—neither have met Jean—Leah returns home. She’s scared and skeptical. She also feels guilty. Not only is there no chance for reconciliation, Leah is scared of what she might find. She doesn’t realize the depth of Jean’s artwork. Inspired by Louise Bourgeois and Agnes Martin, Jean is an autodidact. In what I felt was the book’s only disappointing note, Leah’s life as an editor and translator feels slight and underdeveloped in the face of Jean’s bold expression. These towers are transgressive: spiky, defiant collections of abandoned metal soldered together inside a house that should be condemned.
Leah’s observations speak for themselves: “[T]here is something else on her towers that I can’t quite even grasp, little strange clear-fronted protrusions stuck to the sides of the metal cubes between the spikes. They stick out like little domes and maybe contain something, though from the doorway I can’t tell what. To take in all the towers at once feels impossible, the total absence of the dull sitting room I was expecting, the lumpy sunken chairs, the dusty displays of plates on the back shelves that now contain strange piles of what looks like mutilated spoons, and shoeboxes overflowing with the old photos Jean used to cut up and glue onto the birthday cards I couldn’t throw away fast enough.” The Manglements convey all the knotted love and frustration Jean felt for Leah, for Elliott, for her family, and the world.
Leah muses, “why didn’t it occur to me that she might be crafting a fairy tale of her own, a realm as utterly unclassifiable as Jean herself?” Reading this book, I thought so much about Harry Crews. This is a book filled with men he would be familiar with: rough, brash, crude, and beaten down by life. It’s a landscape he would know well, too. We don’t think of Appalachia and think of a woman who quotes 20th century artists to herself while fashioning sculpture. But we should! It should come as no surprise that art blooms everywhere, but especially in a place in dire need of hope. Found art is fraught with a desperate aching to live. The novel’s title demonstrates a certain work ethic as well as the selflessness of a parent. It’s a book that makes you want to reconsider severed ties, read all the biographies of artists, wander museums, and make your own wild and unruly art.
TAKE WHAT YOU NEED is out in a couple weeks and you can order it now.