An Elegant Woman

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. (June)