AN ELEGANT WOMAN

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.