A long, slow, warm wallow in California’s silent film era

Today’s release at BVC’s bookstore is more than that. Flickers is by Katharine Kerr writing as Kathryn A. Jordan (not to be confused with Katharine Jordan the romance novelist). Flickers is historical women’s fiction, covering the life of young Violet Winters, the daughter of the richest man in her sleepy California town, her love life, her marriage, and her growth from clueless poor little rich girl to a woman who knows herself and her own powers. Jordan dives deep into the lives of her childhood sweetheart Jack, who is wrecked and transformed over and over by his love for Violet, and the life of Violet’s brother-in-law and best friend, a staggeringly beautiful young man suffering from the fact that he’s gay in an era, a world, and a class that have zero tolerance for his kind.

There’s a lot about class in Flickers. This is what grabbed me from the start. Jordan eases slowly into the stiflingly luxurious lifestyle of the inhabitants of La Hacienda del Sueño, Violet’s father’s immense estate on the hills above the little town of Santa Luisa. Jack is the gardener’s son; he hasn’t a hope of marrying Violet. Violet’s only friends, until she marries cold, ambitious Maury Rediston, are servants. Her wealthy father is a not-very-closeted racist. Her mother, suffering from health concerns that are partly physical and partly emotional, can trust only in her maid.

Then the flickers come to town. A small film company sets up a studio in Santa Luisa, and the social stability – read, Violet’s father’s stranglehold on the town’s economy – begins to rock.

This book is a very slow burn. At first I was annoyed with Violet and Jack for being so young and naïve. But the story dragged me into the hazy golden atmosphere of California’s dry, golden hills, the luxuries and demands of being upper class that box Violet in tighter and tighter, the disasters of the era, first Spanish flu, then the Depression, the rise of the KKK, the War, with the huge social upheavals that accompanied these events and rocked the eternal sameness of Violet’s world. I think I got fully sucked in when I realized that Violet’s best friend and brother-in-law Tip Rediston was in agony, courting women he didn’t want when he was hopelessly in love with his other best friend, Jack.

Everything, it turns out, depends on Violet, who begins as surely the weakest reed who ever messed up the lives of everyone she knew, simply by doing what she was told.

This is a very sneaky book. It is also gorgeously long and sensual. It’ll make you cry in a good way. Get it here.