An Elegant Woman

April 1, 2020
A family's myths become a treasured legacy. "How is a person made?" the young Katherine Stewart asks her older sister, Tommy. "I mean a life," she adds, "growing up, understanding who you are and what you want. How does that happen?" That is the essential, vexing question that pervades McPhee's thoughtful, gently told novel about the ways a family's past shapes each generation. Tommy's granddaughter Isadora finds the stories irresistible: A writer, she bases her novels on biographies of real people, just as McPhee has done here, drawing on her own family history. Central to the novel are Tommy and Katherine, cowed by poverty, neglected by their impetuous mother, Glenna, and longing to escape a circumscribed life. Throughout their childhood, they find themselves "elaborating and embellishing" colorful family fables, handed down by Glenna, until both felt that they "had lived not only their brief lives, but also in memories that began long before they were born." Their own lives change dramatically in 1910 when Glenna leaves her adulterous husband, taking her daughters from their home in Ohio to Montana, where she cajoles and flirts her way into being hired as a teacher--pretending to be single, soon foisting her girls on a kindhearted childless couple. She returns after 2 years, sweeping up her daughters once again to accompany her as she continually reinvents herself. As the sisters grow up, they confront the question Katherine asked as a child: how to know who you are. McPhee underscores her characters' evolving identities by playing with names: Tommy was born Thelma; Katherine calls herself Kate and, later, Pat; and these names, too, change--sometimes confusingly--as the narrative spins out and each sister grapples, more or less successfully, with the possibility of self-creation. "Sometimes it feels good to pretend," Tommy reflects, "to be the person you desire, to believe you can have what you please, that what you say is the truth." Delicately rendered characters inform a richly textured family portrait.

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April 6, 2020
In McPhee’s ambitious if uneven latest, a novelist recounts the twists and turns of her grandmother’s life. While Isadora helps her sisters and mother clean out her grandmother’s house in New Jersey, she declares, “If Grammy was our version of Homer, I was Herodotus.” Combining snippets of history with an admittedly embellished narrative, Isadora begins in 1910. Her grandmother, then named Tommy, is taken at five years old with her three-year-old sister, Katherine, by their indomitable mother, Glenna, from their comfortable home in Ohio to begin a harrowing existence in the American West. Glenna leaves the girls with a settler family in Miles City, Mont., while she goes to frontier towns in search of teaching work. After many vicissitudes, the sisters separate as teenagers, and Tommy makes it to New York, where she borrows Katherine’s name and high school diploma to becomes a nurse, while Katherine takes the name Pat and moves to California. After the newly named Katherine marries into high society and becomes a mother and grandmother to four girls, she tells them stories about their heritage, enhancing her dramatic tales with fabrications, such as that they are descendants of Mary, Queen of Scots, and other notable figures. McPhee (Bright Angel Time) sometimes labors too diligently to follow the many threads and family myths, and leans too hard on the novelist-as-narrator frame. Still, her ambitious tale occasionally captivates. Agent: Jin Auh, the Wylie Agency.

Starred review from May 15, 2020
A richly animated work, McPhee's enthralling new novel glides through American history, from early-twentieth-century Billings, Montana, to a Prohibition-era Adirondacks lakeside retreat and beyond, alongside fabulous characters. Sorting through the family home in present-day New Jersey, Isadora, a novelist, tells her late Grammy's story as she would have wished, mingling realistic happenings with embellished ancestral lore. As a stocky child standing with her pretty younger sister, Katherine, on an Ohio train platform in 1910, awaiting their long journey to Montana with their mother, Thelma Tommy Stewart seems unlikely to develop into an elegant East Coast matriarch, but circumstances drive her to become a mistress of self-invention. This quality she picks up from her mother, the fascinating Glenna ( cultivation and wilderness combined in her ), who takes charge of her own life, even depositing her daughters with kindly neighbors while away teaching in a tiny Western town. Later, Tommy raises Katherine alone; while her sister attends school, Tommy earns money by begging and selling coyote pelts. Both make choices that shift their paths in surprising ways. The frequent mentions of hereditary artifacts feel overdone at times. Overall, however, McPhee elevates the generational saga into a dazzling, artfully detailed presentation of self-determination, women's responsibilities and freedoms, and how people craft family legacies.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2020

Drawing on family history, the National Book Award finalist tracks four generations of women, opening with novelist Isadora and her sisters sorting through memory-rich family artifacts. That prompts the story of spirited Glenna Stewart, who heads to Montana in 1910 with her two children and ends up teaching in a one-room schoolhouse and fighting for suffrage. With a 60,000-copy first printing.

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