Novelist Ellis Avery reads from The Last Nude at Elliott Bay Book Company at 7 p.m. on Saturday, January 14, 2012.

Ellis Avery‘s The Last Nude is my first acquaintance with Avery’s writing, though The Teahouse Fire (2006) has found life in five other languages thus far. However, you don’t get named “The Best Writer You’ve Never Heard Of But Should Go Read Right Now” because everyone has, in fact, heard of you.

The Last Nude is likely to remedy that somewhat–NPR to the rescue. It’s an engaging hot-blooded-but-cold-eyed return to 1920s Paris–Further Reading at the book’s back suggests Janet Flanner, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Sylvia Beach–from the perspective of a young model for the sexually omnivorous painter Tamara de Lempicka.

It’s a “historical novel.” History shows that Tamara de Lempicka did paint a young woman, Rafaela, that she met at the Bois de Boulogne, six portraits altogether over the next six months to a year. They slept together. The details of Rafaela’s life, though, are largely Avery’s invention. People just don’t follow around starving nude models, pestering them for their life stories, so Avery has filled in the blanks. I mention that because it becomes difficult to credit this Rafaela as a fictional personage, Avery has done her work so convincingly.

It was an inspired decision, in any event–seeing Paris through Rafaela’s eyes is to see the ’20s in a new light. It’s not just the fashions that aspiring couturière Rafaela describes, but the way she, the ur-teenage girl, keeps falling in love with views of the city and its inhabitants. Paris is the whole package:

The terrasse of the hotel was itself a miniature opera, with its jewel-colored drinks and its coffees, its wrapped squares of chocolate and cubes of sugar, its speakers of many languages, each one smoking expressively.

In Avery’s telling, a teenage Rafaela is shipped off from the Bronx, under the wing of an Italian grandma, to return to the old country for a mostly arranged marriage. But fate intervenes, Paris beckons, Rafaela soon finds herself living by her wits and sex appeal, trying to scrounge up a salesgirl job in a boutique where pretty girls find wealthy princes to put them up in apartments. (Down and Out in Paris and London is not on the Further Reading list, but Avery recounts the brutality and banality of Rafaela’s scrabbling with Orwell’s sociological interest in the efforts of women to exist.)

Things change once de Lempicka enters the picture in her green Bugatti. One day Rafaela is scheming for the funds for a salesgirl’s dress, the next she’s a muse. Things heat up:

My lower lip, throbbing as it dried in the warm air, was having none of it. Tamara was sitting so close I could almost feel the vibration of the charcoal on her tablet jarring me in soft waves. Unconsciously, I close my mouth and let it fall open again, just to repeat the pleasure of Tamara’s finger–my own tongue–across my lip. Suddenly I felt the air thicken.

Then they heat up a little more. Paris when it sizzles, indeed.

It’s Rafaela’s introduction not simply to sleeping with another woman, but to being seen publicly with her, as well. This requires a trip to Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, where more famous names pop out of the woodwork (Hemingway appears as an alternate-reality Ernest, a wounded war correspondent who hasn’t reinvented fiction).

If it seems a bit much, so do the actual Left Bank memoirs; the expatriate social circle just wasn’t that large, and everyone gossiped about everyone else. The plot from here on out reminded me a bit of The Moderns, revolving as it does around the businesses of painting and art collecting and social standings. There are parties and intrigues that keep you turning pages too late at night. It’s thrilling, but Paris has yet another face to show Rafaela, after the ball is over.

After 250 pages–strewn with terrific aperçus like describing a fashion house’s directrice as  “a black-clad picket of indignation”–Avery gives de Lempicka the last word, writing from her old age in Cuernavaca where she is working on her last painting. As was true in real life, it’s a copy of an earlier portrait of Rafaela. An inexpungeable experience, Avery suggests. Artistic vision is ruthless to artists as well their models.