Rich People in Santa Barbara: Two Novellas
A smell of eucalyptus and salt air, morning fogs, mountains in the distance, lust, adultery and unsolved murders. If Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles has been called “the great wrong place,” Elizabeth Gilchrist’s Santa Barbara runs a close second. She is its bard. Her selection of period details is impeccable, her wit and judgment playful and subtle. Her wealthy characters, seemingly proper and socially responsible, listen to the best jazz, eat the most sensible food, drive the hippest cars, and move in an atmosphere of entitled amorality and dread.
— Phillip Lopate, author of Two Marriages, editor of Art of the Personal Essay
Beneath the Gilded Surface
The intersecting worlds of the two novellas are worlds of privilege with eerie shadows beneath the surface.
Photograph of Montecito Peak by permission of Jack Elliott
Montecito Peak
In Montecito Peak, Barbara Palmer, who is very rich – “I was born lucky” – is a good mother to 14-year-old Betsy, the guiding light of Bird of Paradise Books, an involved member of the Concours d’Elegance committee. But emotionally she’s treading water. Her husband is a peevish alcoholic. He’s a terrible father. No one would think less of her if she divorced him.
But he would still always be in her life being a drag. Then one day Barbara falls in love with Mike Brooke. A reciprocated love. The odious husband has to go.
The Polo Club
In The Polo Club, Lydia Graham is a garden designer who grew up in Montecito. Her husband is a longboard surfer who’s good at making money. He’s a great father to their 15-yr-old daughter. It’s a happy marriage.
Then Hunter Evans, a man whom Lydia knew when she was fourteen and he was thirty-two, returns to Santa Barbara. Socially connected, still terribly attractive – and a dubious character – he rents a condo at the Polo Club. He understands Lydia all too well, and suddenly he’s a danger to her marriage. This cannot be allowed.
“These are two wonderful, engaging novellas about the all-but-secret world of Santa Barbara society of the not-so-distant past. These people are still around behind their gates and high hedges. Beneath the snobbery and scandal, there is something eerie, something noir. Elizabeth Gilchrist knew this world well, and she writes of it with sympathy, humor, and ruthless honesty. A great read.”
Kent Anderson
Author, Sympathy for the Devil, Night Dogs, Green Sun, and Liquor, Guns & Ammo.
“Elizabeth Gilchrist portrays the lives of characters with generational wealth in Santa Barbara’s coastal city through meticulous descriptions of settings, bringing the characters to life as they navigate life’s vicissitudes.”
Elsie Augustave
Author, The Roving Tree.
“In Rich People in Santa Barbara, Elizabeth Gilchrist captures the intoxicating, claustrophobic world of the coastal elite, where the light is pervasively golden, the wine endlessly flows, and the cost of happiness is just beyond reach. Barbara and Lydia are women on the edge, their lives and relationships as meticulously constructed as the gardens they tend. Gilchrist’s prose is lush, vibrant and her characters are unforgettable.”
Adam Cushman
Author, Cut.