Nell Presser, the hero of
Erin McGraw's second novel, The Seamstress Of Hollywood Boulevard, has a particular talent
in sewing: Women in her small, turn-of-the-century Kansas farming town come to
her with the latest Vogue fashion illustrations and ask her to replicate
them, but she goes further. She knows the invisible stitches and tucks each
garment needs to create the illusion that the women have the bodies they
imagine, rather than the ones they really have. The book's particular
enchantment is cast when she turns this skill in subterfuge to other purposes
in a fully realized great American journey.
At 15, Nell marries a
farmer because she heard he once rescued kittens from under an outhouse, and
because her new sod house will mean an end to her father's beatings. Two years
later, after two difficult pregnancies, Nell persists in her piecework because
her waspish mother-in-law resents its intrusion into household chores. When her
husband sells her sewing machine, hoping she'll pay more attention to their
fractious daughters and finally give him a son, Nell's secret savings just
barely furnish a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, where she joins the legions of
single female emigrants as a "shoppie" at a dry-goods store. Slaving away at
night in her boarding house, she establishes herself as Madame Annelle, the
French-born dressmaker to genteel L.A. society, with a sideline in costumes for
the new movie studios; lying about her age, she finds a new husband who seems
as attuned as her to the possibilities of their oceanfront life.
McGraw breaks the mold for
the obstinate turn-of-the-century female protagonist, but Nell has to compete
with McGraw's meticulously researched surroundings for pride of place. Nell's
Los Angeles is a frontier town crossed with Tolstoy's Russia: Its older
residents are obsessed with preserving the image of propriety against any
encroachments, even while they're drawing considerable funds from unsavory
speculation in land and water rights. Nell constantly feels the twinge of
discarding her small-town mores, but even in California, she's split between
refined businesswoman and wide-eyed escapee—a bifurcation made even more
painful when the novel takes an dark turn. The sedulous craftsmanship of
McGraw's writing, like the neat stitches of her protagonist, makes each
development fall out naturally in service to the story.