Review: 'An Elegant Woman,' by Martha McPhee

Isadora, the narrator of Martha McPhee's fifth novel, "An Elegant Woman," is a writer with deep curiosity about her family history. Fortunately, her grandmother — known, among other monikers, as Tommy, Katherine and Grammy — is a teller of endless tales, dashed here and there with truth.

"Grammy" has such a tangle of names and identities that she is best approached chronologically, and so Isadora begins when Grammy — born Thelma and called "Tommy" — is a precocious 5-year-old. Tommy is protective of her younger sister, Katherine, "etched delicately as filigree"; she is also keenly aware of their mother's machinations and aspirations.

The girls' mother, Glenna, is almost comically fearless, aided by "a vanity that made her appear beautiful." Insulted both by her husband's affair and by the domestic expectations for women, Glenna leaves Ohio for Montana in 1910, claiming widowhood when it's convenient, terrifying her daughters by leaving them with a group of nuns shortly after boarding a westbound train.

In one of the novel's strongest scenes, McPhee slows the prose to the fretful pace of Tommy's thoughts as she wonders whether or not Glenna has truly abandoned her daughters. Waiting in the "choke-throat quiet" with strange women, Katherine admits to fear while Tommy refuses to acknowledge it. The hours on the train are a snapshot of the Stewart family's future: Glenna's acts of abrupt abandonment and her occasional returns; Tommy's fortitude and stealth (she steals from the nuns on the train); Katherine's reliance on Tommy, and on her beauty, for survival.

The novel's finest pages are the ones set in Montana, where the sisters grow up against the backdrop of the American West. McPhee describes Miles City: "Ranchers owned the town. Cattle owned the town, roaming the streets like pedestrians, kicking up dust. … There were more saddleries than all other businesses combined. There were almost no women." Crucially, for the Stewart women, "out here you could make your own truth."

This project of truth-making takes on a greater dimension for the sisters, both of whom fashion a new identity when they leave Montana. Tommy applies to nursing school in New York on Katherine's behalf — of the two sisters, only Katherine has a high school diploma — but it is clear to all, including the reader, that she will go in Katherine's stead. To make this possible, she takes Katherine's name for herself. At the time, this doesn't trouble Katherine, who wants to be known as "Patricia" and whose goal is to move to California, where she can become a star.

The novel falters somewhat once the sisters separate, speeding up to cover their adult lives and those of the next two generations. Katherine has children (Jet, Winter), suburban wealth, snobbery, a marriage with unsurprising flaws. The original Katherine Stewart becomes Pat Bennett in California, happily married in a humble house with one son, Slim, who returns at the end of the novel to regale Isadora with more family lore. There is so much history packed into the pages through eloquent summary that the slower-paced scenes truly stand out: Tommy and Slim dressing Glenna at a funeral home; Jet's rude paramour pulling jewelry right out of Tommy's earlobes, trying and failing to remove a diamond from her hand. The writing is at its best in these tense moments, when no amount of name-changing can afford the characters any escape.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy's writing has appeared in Electric Literature, LennyLetter, Narrative, the Millions, Harvard Review and elsewhere. She held a 2014-16 Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

An Elegant Woman
By: Martha McPhee.
Publisher: Scribner, 405 pages, $27.