Aharsh prairie wind scours the pages of Erin McGraw's beautifully written second novel, "The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard." Even after Nell Plat uproots herself from Mercer County, Kan., and follows her dreams to California, gusts of memory buffet her new life as a shopgirl and aspiring costume designer in early 20th century Los Angeles.
McGraw, who has also written three short story collections, crafts masterful sentences that embody the landscapes her heroine inhabits.
Kansas in 1899 confines and maddens 15-year-old Nell: "Hot and itchy, I would stroll out to lean on the garden fence and look at the dim horizon, as if it might have changed in the last ten minutes. . . . [B]ehind me the onions burned."
Nell can't cook -- a vital female skill in this hardscrabble world -- and although she can sew brilliantly, this is almost an affront. When she starts making fine dresses for the county's ladies and handing some earnings to her mother-in-law (stowing the rest), all her husband Jack sees is that she's not doing her chores.
A mother at 16 and pregnant again, Nell knows there is nothing ahead but more babies and chores. Sewing is her ticket out, as her secret stash grows toward the $110 a train ticket to Los Angeles costs.
But this is no simple tale of liberation. McGraw shows hard, fierce Nell rejecting Jack's tentative pride in her. "[I]n town this afternoon . . . I could tell which dresses you made," he says. "There's no one else got a wife like you. . . . Christ, Nell, it's a compliment."
Her stony response: "Not one I care for."
Nell doesn't want to make a better life with Jack; she wants a whole new life. So she leaves behind 1-year-old Lucille and infant Amelia and heads for that city where people go to reinvent themselves.
McGraw's evocation of Los Angeles is as vividly economical as her portrait of Kansas. Nell gets a job at Levisky's Ladies Wear, downtown on Spring Street. Then she upgrades, first to Carter's Department Store in Glendale and, after that, to more fashionable shops in tonier locations, "moving toward Pasadena one storefront at a time."
Pasadena is the Promised Land she imagined in Kansas, "the Eden without dark or dirt, where prosperity shone from the shiny motorcars at the curbs." To get there, she assumes the name Madame Annelle; her modest shirtwaists for fellow "shoppies" bring her enough money to start a business as a fashionable seamstress. Fascinated by the burgeoning movie industry, she wangles piecework from a costume designer at Universal.
