TAKE WHAT YOU NEED

When a woman is left a roomful of giant metal artworks by her long-estranged stepmother, a journey begins.

Both characters who narrate this inspiring novel, spare yet packed with plot and ideas, are from a tiny fictional town in the southern Allegheny Mountains. Jean was married to Leah's father until Leah was 10, when their flourishing bond was severed by divorce. In her 60s, living in the house she grew up in, Jean taught herself welding from YouTube videos and began making towers out of sheet metal, decorating them with oddments trapped in little vitrines and quotes like "I WANT TO BELIEVE IN SOLITUDE AND THE GLORY OF MY INNER HORSEFACE, DON'T YOU?" Inspired by the work and writings of Louise Bourgeois, Jean had "no nerve in the morning if [she] skipped [her] nightly Louise," who "made art seem like something any obsessive loner who craved it could achieve." Leah, Jean's one-time stepdaughter, left town long ago, moving to Peru after college, eventually returning to settle in New York with her husband, Gerardo, and son, Silvestre. As the book opens, she is on her way home for the first time in years, having gotten a call from a man who was living with Jean at the time of her death. It's not an easy journey, with the GPS cutting out in rural Pennsylvania and her Spanish-speaking family receiving hostile attention at a gas station festooned with flags. When they get to Jean's, they find a broken-down neighborhood, a scary man with no front teeth, and what Jean referred to as her Manglements. The end of the book comes in a rush as Novey does the metaphorical equivalent of what Jean saw a man doing at the flea market. "He was shifting the height of the shelf and the glass jars to best catch the sunlight moving through his marbles and the pockets of air between them. After his next tweak, a jar of translucent green marbles caught the light in such a divine way the marbles lit up from within." "That’s Art," Jean tells him. "You made it happen, thank you."

Transforming the odd and the homely into something beautiful is both the subject and the accomplishment of this book.