The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (review)

The first time I heard of a sod house I was about eight years old, reading On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Laura lived in a sod house. It had one dim grease-paper window and flowers growing on the roof above her head. There’s a picture of it on the cover of the book, and in it Laura is running across the florid roof while Ma happily irons inside.

In Erin McGraw’s novel, The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard, our protagonist Nell Presser lives in a sod house. This house is in Kansas, a place where the “skies came in two varieties . . . raining or blowing” and “the sun would blister the skin off your neck.” There are no windows, no flowers, and no one’s smiling. The Presser family—Mama, Pa, and Nell’s two simple sisters live like inmates in the same dirt-walled cell. Nell knows how things work in this prison, “I was smart about Pa, too, and I could judge when he had drunk one glass of whiskey too many and was itching to hit something . . . I could tell a beating was coming the same way a person can smell rain.”

There is more for Nell than whitewashing the dirt walls and feeding the chickens. “I couldn’t cook but I could sew,” she claims in the novel’s opening line, and it is the talent that will both save and isolate her, away from Kansas to the hopefulness of California just after the turn of the century.

Nell is a “brown haired girl, skinny as a fish,” and she is quickly caught, when only fifteen-years old, by a local boy named Jack Plat. The Plat family has a window in their soddy and a rug that is the showcase of the house. To Nell it seems better than what her family has, although she’s not so keen on Jack himself: “Jack was shorter than me, with bandy legs and hair so curly that we used to say baa to him in school.” Life as a Plat turns out to be not unlike the one she had at home. A single window and a rug aren’t the luxuries of Nell’s dreams: “Water seeped through the house’s sod walls, and muddy patches bloomed on the fresh pictures from the Sears catalogue that my mother-in-law and I had put up after taking a hard brush to the roof and floors—spring cleaning in Mercer County.”

The writing in this novel is never sharper than when McGraw gives us the soiled grit of the domestic landscape. I found myself riveted to these scenes with the same wonder I held when reading Wilder as a child. McGraw has updated the sod story by placing a close-up lens on every detail. When Nell throws up in the slop bowl each morning during her first pregnancy, her mother-in-law is kind enough to say of the cleanup, “That can wait until later.” Nell’s marriage progresses into a battle between her urges for independence and creativity (designing dresses for the town ladies) and Jack’s urge for control. When a nine-months pregnant, Nell hides behind a bull to avoid her fist-flailing boy of a husband, the reader becomes fully engrossed in the mud of this story.

“Be careful. He can kill you,” Jack warns her, as if speaking of himself. Nell notes, “His eyes had the look of shallow water.” The exchange is chilling, not just for what we fear and dread for Nell, but for what we feel and dread for every woman and man in the county. McGraw creates sympathy so effortlessly that we can’t help but feel that everyone in this story, even the hateful Jack Plat, is somehow a victim of the circumstances of a mud house in an unforgiving Kansas landscape.

When the first daughter, Lucille, is born, it’s no surprise that Nell doesn’t take to her right away: “Nothing...