Reviewed by Adam Goldwyn
6.19.07

“You’re caught in the middle of the web you’ve woven yourself, aren’t you? Here is your lover, and here is her husband,” one of the characters tells Claude Reynaud, the eponymous hero of Elizabeth Birkelund Oberbeck’s debut novel The Dressmaker. These two short sentences contain, in miniature, the novel’s plot. The romantic conflict is set up early, its dénouement never really in doubt. While “predictable,” that easy critique, has proven fatal to so many novels dealing with the eternal triangle, in the case of The Dressmaker, it becomes a source of strength, the seed from which the rest of the novel flowers. Like driving through the French countryside the novel so delicately details, The Dressmaker is not about destination as much as journey, not about achievement as much as admiration. The book’s greatest rewards come not from telling us whether Claude will successfully woo Valentine from her husband Victor, but in allowing us, through the window of this conflict, a privileged view into the inner lives and surroundings of the people involved: The Dressmaker is a novel of relationships, of points and counterpoints, of opposites balanced against one another, of un-remarked upon, and perhaps even unintentional, moments of insight.

Claude is the last of a long line of dressmakers operating out of the same house, with the same sign hanging out front, that his great-grandfather built at the turn of the twentieth-century in Senlis, a small rural town outside of Paris. Though at first we are given a picture of perfect stability, the tone of the novel changes abruptly halfway through the first chapter with the quiet phrase: “Times were changing.” Sophisticated Parisiennes started coming, and they “broke the speed limit as they entered the humble town of Senlis… on the rue Vieille de Paris, and ancient thoroughfare for textile merchants traveling from Paris to Flanders.”

Oberbeck’s understated prose is both at its most charming and insightful in the little descriptive sentences, like this one, which pepper the novel. Without so much as directly naming it, Oberbeck introduces one of the novel’s themes: globalization. Claude and all the other characters are caught up in a fast-moving world where the old ways are dying out. Oberbeck counterpoints Claude’s simple rustic life, where the tailor provides individual and personal attention to each of his clients with the Salon de Silvaine, one of the greatest fashion houses in the world. The Salon de Silvaine, and the forces it represents– rampant consumerism, mass production, uniformity– close in on him from all sides, providing him both undreamed of opportunity, but also rules and regulations to fetter his creativity.

This pairing of opposites can be seen again in Claude’s only two friends: Anatole, the celibate catholic priest who eats the same meal at the same table at the same restaurant every day and whose great feat is resisting his parishioner’s plea to replace the old church bell with a digital recording, and Rico, an old friend from art school whom “Claude saw twice a year, when Rico returned home to Paris from the whirlwind of his life around the world, usually with a new girlfriend on each arm.” Again, through Claude’s relationships, Oberbeck offers a glimpse into the widening gulf between tradition and modernity, the slow pace of rural society and the fast pace of globalized cities. She shows us, too, Claude’s ambivalence toward each. He may take greater satisfaction from designing peasant dresses for his nephew’s adolescent girlfriend, but he also has to ready the Spring line for Fashion Week in New York City.

Though the novel is set against this backdrop, its characters constrained by large impersonal forces beyond their control, the novel’s heart lies in a very different place: intimate, private moments (all too often played out in public settings) between people oblivious of the world around them. Oberbeck offers us the power-marriage of Claude’s love interest Valentine and her husband Victor: childhood friends who share a deep and powerful, if un-romantic, emotional connection. Both sit at the top of the international art world and are feted lavishly and constantly at chic SoHo art lofts and Paris auction houses. Contrast this with Claude’s sister Juliette and her husband Bernard. They live in a small house ten minutes on foot from where she was born in Senlis, and have four boisterous children in their messy house. Though Oberbeck does not emphasize the contrasts between the two couples, they inevitably serve as opposing models of domesticity, each portrayed as having both positive and negative attributes. Indeed, one of Oberbeck’s great successes in the novel is her ability to create well-rounded characters and scenes without inserting her own morality. She presents her characters as they are, leaving any approbation or censure to the reader.

The most rounded portrait—and not coincidentally the one in which the novel’s many conflicts are most deeply and intensely explored—is that of Valentine herself. Valentine is a prominent figure in the art world, the very picture of success, ambition and perfection. Yet in her secret life with Claude, she shows herself at times to be impetuous to a fault, most conspicuously in their affair, but also when standing on roof ledges, giving away family heirlooms and attempting to break priceless antiques. Yet in her married life, she becomes strangely submissive. At first she is a sympathetic character, sacrificing her own personal happiness in order to be with Victor when he suffers a professional disaster. Later, however, as Victor descends ever deeper into alcoholism, Valentine shows textbook symptoms of co-dependence. Her half-hearted efforts to get Victor into Alcoholics Anonymous while enduring significant domestic abuse, emotional and possibly even physical, offer a completely different perspective on the steely businesswoman. At first, Valentine is a flat character: the seductress, the muse, the mystery, but as the novel progresses, Oberbeck deepens and rounds her depiction of Valentine, offering us a complex portrait of a flawless façade and a crumbling interior, and an ever more desperate woman trying impossibly to hold the pieces together.

The world Oberbeck has created in The Dressmaker is one in which all the characters do their best under circumstances beyond their control, forced to make quick and irreversible decisions on a moment’s notice, and then having to live with the consequences of those decisions forever. Oberbeck offers us a chance to meditate on the capriciousness of love, the uncertainty of other people’s emotions and the impossibility of possessing that which one most desires, even when it is right in front of them.