Night for Day

Los Angeles, 1950. Over the course of a single day, two friends grapple with the moral and professional uncertainties of the escalating Communist witch-hunt in Hollywood. Director John Marsh races to convince his actress wife not to turn informant for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, while leftist screenwriter Desmond Frank confronts the possibility of exile to live and work without fear of being blacklisted. As Marsh and Frank struggle to complete shooting on their film She Turned Away, which updates the myth of Orpheus to the gritty noir underworld of post-war Los Angeles, the chaos of their private lives pushes them towards a climactic confrontation with complicity, jealousy, and fear.

Night for Day conjures a feverish vision of one of the country’s most notorious periods of national crisis, illuminating the eternal dilemma of both art and politics: how to make the world anew. At once a definitively American novel, echoing Philip Roth and Raymond Chandler, it also nods to the mythic landscapes of Dante and the iconoclastic playfulness of James Joyce. With as much to say about the early years of the Cold War as about the political and social divisions that continue to divide the country today, Night for Day is expansive in scope and yet tenderly intimate, exploring the subtleties of belonging and the enormity of exile-not only from one’s country but also from one’s self.

What the Critics Said

“In the final pages of Patrick Flanery’s immersive fourth novel, Helen Fairdale sits down to write a letter. It’s the summer of 2016; in her youth she was an actor in Hollywood, at the beck and call of the studio system in the years after the second world war, a period of anti-communist hysteria when the House Un-American Activities Committee wielded terrifying power. The film industry was a particular focus of the committee’s investigations, culminating in the persecution of the ‘Hollywood 10’, a group of writers and directors called to testify in 1947. When they refused to cooperate, the men received jail sentences and blacklistings. Helen recalls the righteous venom of those bygone days. ‘How could men and women in the 1940s and 1950s who believed they were doing good (as I want to believe the witch hunters did believe, whatever we thought of them then, whatever we think of them now) possibly fail to see they were doing evil?’ In this novel that evil is visited chiefly on its main narrator and protagonist, screenwriter Desmond Frank. Frank, like the book’s other characters, is Flanery’s invention, although a bibliography reveals the depth of the author’s research into the period. . . Reflecting on his past, Frank calls the US ‘nothing but a nation of the unequal led by people who think they are prophets, that’s what this country has always been’. Sound familiar? Turn on the news in 2019, or scroll through Twitter, and it’s hard not to share Frank’s sentiments. Night for Day . . . its title a riff on the ‘day-for-night’ filming technique that distinguished film noir cinematography. . . make[s] the past cast its light on the present” — Erica Wagner, The Guardian

“Patrick Flanery, an American living in London, has released three deftly executed and hard-to-categorize novels. Absolution (2012), his first, had a South African setting that flashed between the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. Radicals, writers, criminals and cops populated a terrain dense with racial, economic and political landmines. Fallen Land (2013) opened with an early twentieth-century lynching before settling in to a tale of early twenty-first-century real estate development failure. I Am No One (2016) was a Highsmithian tracking of one man’s escalating paranoia and rage at the surveillance state.  Clearly Flanery has a political bent, and his hefty new novel situates itself in a turbulent place and time — Hollywood in the 1950s — where questionable governmental grandstanding and the use of unsubstantiated accusation had a concentrated impact that still resonates. . . Flanery’s funniest and most entertainingly melodramatic novel. . . it is full of metadiegetic material. . . There’s the screenplay Desmond and his director have written. . . Flanery having good fun with film noir conventions. . . there are also memos from studio honchos, transcripts of psychiatric sessions, and third-person accounts of FBI interrogations. . . There’s also murder, hallucinogens, and the requisite grand and dissolute party. . . ‘Americans have the shortest sense of history of any powerful nation on earth,’ Desmond at one point observes. For those who look to the 50s as a time of American greatness, Flanery’s novel stands as a forceful corrective.” — Mark Kamine, TLS