Edinburgh Napier University

  Idra Novey’s third novel, Take What You Need (2023), depicts the complexities of a contemporary America whose divisions are often crudely defined. Through a story of ex-step-parenthood, it portrays individual traumas of separation and loss from the narrative perspectives of a mother and daughter, whose attempts to reconnect are at the centre of the text. Alongside this moving portrayal of trauma and attempts to work through trauma, however, is a story of the impact of the slow violence of systemic poverty under neoliberalism in rural Appalachia, and these visions of ostensibly oppositional forms of violence intersect. Both forms pose well-known representational problems: how can trauma be depicted if by nature it cannot be fully understood, and how can slow violence be depicted if it is by nature incremental? In Take What You Need, these phenomena overlap, and their point of intersection comes through the novel’s other key concern: the violent rise of Trump’s America. Ultimately, I argue that the novel models a complex but not uncommon phenomena where resonance between trauma, systemic violence, and political division comingle. I show how Novey’s simple but potent device of dual first-person narratives (mother and daughter), facilitates this by emphasising successful and failed attempts to witness and see. Not only, I argue, is Take What You Need an innovative trauma narrative, but it is an excoriating critique of the violence of MAGA culture that simultaneously urges caution at the assumptions one might make of those caught in its toxic currents.