All writers studying their craft should be encouraged to try translation, thinks Idra Novey, the Pennsylvania-born novelist, poet and, si, translator. Working in another language confers the freedom to slip out of their own voices, developing their own tone in the process, she told one interviewer.

On the strength of Novey’s third novel, Take What You Need, an adept tale about an estranged stepmother and daughter set in a fictional former steel town in Appalachia, all writers should heed her advice. In spare, affecting prose, she moves effortlessly between her two first-person narrators: sixty something Jean, and Leah, who was ten when Jean walked out on Leah’s dad, leaving a child in mourning for the woman who had brought her up on fairy tales while drawing chalk castles on the driveway.

Novey, whose works in translation include Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., picks up their story decades later. Leah has heard that Jean is dead and is struggling with the revelation while driving back from Long Island City, Queens, to her former hometown in the southern Allegheny Mountains, which Jean never left. Also news to Leah is that Jean had become an artist in her old age, welding metal towers in her living room. She died from slipping off a ladder, or so Leah is told by a man called Elliott who had been living with Jean.

Jean’s share of the narrative starts further back, mixing reminiscences about raising Leah with her anguish at losing touch: ‘I’d become a nonentity to Leah now, former stepmother being a non-position, with no reliable shape whatsoever.’ Elliott’s single-parent family has recently moved in next door. The city has cut off their water, so Jean lets them fill jugs from her outdoor tap. Elliott winds up helping Jean, for money, to lift the heavy sheets of scrap metal she welds into sculptures she calls ‘Manglements’, artworks inspired by her heroes Louise Bourgeois and Agnes Martin. When Elliott wonders about Jean’s creations she tells him:

It’s just what I do, instead of admitting anything I would’ve liked to say aloud about art requiring a degree of bullheadedness – about Agnes Martin saying a real artist has to be able to fail and fail and still go on.

Towers. Ladders. Stepmothers. And, later, shattered mirrors and disquieting scenes in dark woods: Novey’s own fairy tale similarities are plentiful and purposeful as she explores the polarisations in American society alongside what it means to ‘make art’. Opening with Jean’s death means a happy ending is unlikely, but Novey isn’t constructing that sort of fairy tale. She writes to remind us that we all have the power to sculpt our own lives, regardless of the material.