What do you think?
Rate this book
Night for Day
A feverish vision of McCarthy-era Hollywood...
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 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.
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 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.
672 pages, Paperback
Published September 3, 2020
6 people are currently reading
75 people want to read
About the author
Patrick Flanery
20 books78 followersPatrick Flanery was born in California in 1975 and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. After earning a BFA in Film from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts he worked for three years in the film industry before moving to the UK, where he completed a doctorate in Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University of Oxford. As well as publishing scholarly articles on British and South African literature and film in a number of academic journals, he has written for Slightly Foxed and The Times Literary Supplement. He lives in London.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 30, 2019
At the exact point this book should start building to a conclusion, it stalls. 260 pages in and things needed to accelerate. But it is far, far too indulgent and is another example of a writer having complete disregard for the reader. I mean, Flanery owes me nothing, but he could make my life better if he liked, simply by writing this book tighter. Shame, because the premise is really good.
February 3, 2022
An always unsettling, thoughtful writer : Hollywood, McCarthyism, Truth, Lies, Betrayal
I nail my colours to my mast, - Flanery is a wonderful writer, and I profess myself bemused he does not garner more buzz about his books.
He is always writing about many things, his finger on the pulse of times and places, writes precisely – even beautifully when the character demands it – but does not indulge beautiful writing for showing-how-beautifully-he writes. Narrative is engaging, characters always rounded, complex and real.
Now, this book, set primarily in America during the McCarthy Era, during the making of a film, looks at deception, hiding in plain sight, denying who you are, creating a mask, within the film industry. Which is of course, about the creation of illusion itself. Even the title subverts – common parlance in film language is ‘Day for Night’ – shooting scenes in the day and lighting them to give the illusion that the shoot took place at night. Sound commercial reasons for this. Flanery suggests a deeper layer still of filmic illusion
The McCarthy era sniffed out ‘moral turpitude’ Primarily this was on a political spectrum. Even a pale shade of pink was suspect, and there was massed paranoia whipped up about reds hiding under beds. As for who was actually IN the bed, with whom, and what they might be doing together…lots of prurient outrage abounded. And the twin horror would be a lefty gay or lesbian.
So…………without giving too much away there are a whole raft of people here, peddling illusions for all they are worth, not only in the films, but in their own lives
This is dark and serious stuff – but is also wonderfully funny – Desmond Frank, the central character, and narrator of Night For Day, is a respected film writer, a good one, but commerce and the Philistine money makers, and those prim lipped McCarthyites sniffing the wind for anything which might not be ‘wholesome’ keep getting in the way. Anything ‘Arty’ is also of course suspect. And suspicions inevitably about that ‘Arty’, probably equals Commie, probably also equals sexual deviance………………..
The trajectory of the book recounts a particular cataclysmic day on the set of a movie, when life fell apart, but is now looked back on, decades later, by Frank, now very elderly, nearing death, living in Italy:
“It may take centuries before America finally sees what it did in those years, assuming the country does not tear itself apart before such understanding becomes possible. Americans have the shortest sense of history of any powerful nation on earth. We think ourselves both young and eternal. There is no national memory of centuries of darkness, of those great long lapses in reason that mark the millennial histories of older civilisations……There is no ability to see that a step in the wrong direction cannot be corrected overnight but may take epochs to put right”
Whilst this did not quite reach the astonishing heights of Flanery’s first two books, Absolution and Fallen Land, I thoroughly recommend it
Film buffs should also love this, particularly those devoted to movies of the 40s and 50s
I nail my colours to my mast, - Flanery is a wonderful writer, and I profess myself bemused he does not garner more buzz about his books.
He is always writing about many things, his finger on the pulse of times and places, writes precisely – even beautifully when the character demands it – but does not indulge beautiful writing for showing-how-beautifully-he writes. Narrative is engaging, characters always rounded, complex and real.
Now, this book, set primarily in America during the McCarthy Era, during the making of a film, looks at deception, hiding in plain sight, denying who you are, creating a mask, within the film industry. Which is of course, about the creation of illusion itself. Even the title subverts – common parlance in film language is ‘Day for Night’ – shooting scenes in the day and lighting them to give the illusion that the shoot took place at night. Sound commercial reasons for this. Flanery suggests a deeper layer still of filmic illusion
The McCarthy era sniffed out ‘moral turpitude’ Primarily this was on a political spectrum. Even a pale shade of pink was suspect, and there was massed paranoia whipped up about reds hiding under beds. As for who was actually IN the bed, with whom, and what they might be doing together…lots of prurient outrage abounded. And the twin horror would be a lefty gay or lesbian.
So…………without giving too much away there are a whole raft of people here, peddling illusions for all they are worth, not only in the films, but in their own lives
This is dark and serious stuff – but is also wonderfully funny – Desmond Frank, the central character, and narrator of Night For Day, is a respected film writer, a good one, but commerce and the Philistine money makers, and those prim lipped McCarthyites sniffing the wind for anything which might not be ‘wholesome’ keep getting in the way. Anything ‘Arty’ is also of course suspect. And suspicions inevitably about that ‘Arty’, probably equals Commie, probably also equals sexual deviance………………..
The trajectory of the book recounts a particular cataclysmic day on the set of a movie, when life fell apart, but is now looked back on, decades later, by Frank, now very elderly, nearing death, living in Italy:
“It may take centuries before America finally sees what it did in those years, assuming the country does not tear itself apart before such understanding becomes possible. Americans have the shortest sense of history of any powerful nation on earth. We think ourselves both young and eternal. There is no national memory of centuries of darkness, of those great long lapses in reason that mark the millennial histories of older civilisations……There is no ability to see that a step in the wrong direction cannot be corrected overnight but may take epochs to put right”
Whilst this did not quite reach the astonishing heights of Flanery’s first two books, Absolution and Fallen Land, I thoroughly recommend it
Film buffs should also love this, particularly those devoted to movies of the 40s and 50s
January 19, 2024
God its so long, but so worth it.
It's so beautifully written, and the ending is absolutely gutting but it was such a wonderful read.
It's so beautifully written, and the ending is absolutely gutting but it was such a wonderful read.
October 25, 2025
Very unusually for me I had to give up on this one. If you're reading for pleasure, life's too short to slog through a book that's about 400 pages too long, skips between different plots that you don't feel at all engaged with and has dull and annoying characters that you can't identify with. Just not one for me.
January 2, 2021
Wonderful interweaving of storylines and times along with the marvelous screenplay.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews