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. “The last time I saw you was the day my life ended,” runs the book’s first line. Frank is recalling his Hollywood past from the distance of the present: these days he’s an elderly expat living out his days in Florence with Alessio, an Italian painter many years his junior. They are more companions than lovers now, and Frank is haunted by an old lost love. It soon becomes clear that the “you” to whom his recollections are addressed is his former partner Myles, a silver-screen heartthrob who enters into a mariage blanc with Helen in order to conceal the fact that he is gay; Helen is herself a lesbian, though her own relationship remains largely off stage. Sodomy laws made homosexuality a crime in those not-so-long-ago days; the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual defined homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disturbance. Plus, it was bad for box office.
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