Take What You Need is Ms. Novey’s first novel set in the United States, and her most autobiographical. It is also her most moving ... Fast-paced and tightly structured ... Take What You Need is a heart-rending book, but it’s also a beautiful celebration of 'the glorious pleasure of erecting something new,' be it a work of art or a human connection.
Does not skirt gritty subjects. Concerned with characters who fall outside easily defined categories, it tackles big questions — like what qualifies as art — as well as the aching human need to be seen ... If the politics and the fairy tale scaffolding seem at times heavy-handed, Take What You Need is still a compelling piece of work.
Impressive ... The novel’s cleverness — its commitment to ambivalence and complexity and discomfort — is haunting, and, for a divided nation, it’s a salutary tale.
Opens with a striking line ... In alternating chapters, Jean and Leah tell their respective stories. It's a satisfying structure, allowing us to seep by turns into their voices and worlds. What may mark this novel out as unusual, even rogue, is its focus on two starkly distinct women from two generations who've fought bravely for what they managed to gain ... Novey's prose, brisk and direct, tacks back and forth in time ... The novel fulfills its first line's proposition: as an incantation of an artist's name and, by implication, an artist's way.
This could be the start to a story about a family torn apart by Fox News, but Novey upends familiar platitudes on our country’s divisions in an odd novel about the ways that the people and places we love can become enigmas to us, and the ineffable impulse to make art. In Jean, Novey has crafted a character who refuses easy categorization ... Though Sevlick and its reactionary politics initially seem the source of Leah’s and Jean’s silence, as the novel progresses, Novey delves past this more obvious conflict to mine deeper sources of estrangement ... Grappling with the mysteries we present to one another, Novey pushes back against the fairy tales we’ve told ourselves about polarizing places like Appalachia, spinning a far more artful story.
Novey’s richly complex third novel shows not only a nuanced appreciation for the artistic process but also places such creativity within the toxic distrust sewn by poverty, misogyny, and xenophobia. In Jean, Novey has constructed a cantankerous character whose artistic passion, fierce independence, and fragile emotional state make her impossible to forget.
Blistering if uneven ... Some of these scenes are well done, with low-level tension as Jean and Elliot gradually warm to each other and an excellent staging of a mishap involving a grinder and a life-threatening gash, but others are a bit too drawn out ... Novey brings nuance to depictions of the marginalized locals from Jean’s point of view. It’s a solid effort, but it doesn’t have the power of the author’s previous outing.
Take What You Need grapples with large-scale xenophobic tensions, as well as the more finely detailed ones among family. But again and again, Novey returns to the persistent question of what it means to make art in spite of everything ... Novey has again crafted a bold and uncompromising novel from a clear-eyed point of view.
