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by Patrick Nathan
A dazzling novel about the inextricable link between the personal and the political set against the decadence of Hollywood and postwar Los Angeles.
As a Hungarian immigrant working as a studio hack writing monster movies in 1950s Hollywood, George Curtis must navigate the McCarthy-era studio system filled with possible communists and spies, the life of closeted men along Sunset Boulevard, and the inability of the era to cleave love from persecution and guilt. But when Madeline, a famous actress, offers George a writing residency at her estate in Malibu to work on the political writing he cares most deeply about, his world is blown open. Soon Madeline is carrying George like an ornament into a class of postwar L.A. society ordinarily hidden from men like him.
What this lifestyle hides behind, aside from the monsters on the screen, are the monsters dwelling closer to home: this bacchanalia covers a gnawing hole shelled wide by the horror of the war they thought they'd left behind and the glimpse of an atomic future. It's here that George understands he can never escape his past as György, the queer Jew who fled Budapest before the war and landed in New York, all alone, a decade prior.
Spanning from sun-drenched Los Angeles to the hidden corners of working-class New York to a virtuosic climax in the Las Vegas desert, The Future Was Color is an immaculately written exploration of postwar American decadence, reinventing the self through art, and the psychosis that lingers in a world that's seen the bomb.
"Nathan writes with the eloquence of a nimble mind working at the height of his powers. Gripping from the first sentence ... Profound, life-affirming, and splendidly seductive, The Future Was Color deserves to become a new lodestar in the ever-expanding constellation of gay literature." —Shelf Awareness (starred review)
"Masterful ... very sexy and insistently alive. This one's an ode to the people and projects that light us up, in spite of all the darkness ... Take this one to the beach house and snort it up with the sunset. You won't regret it!" —Literary Hub
"A work of muscular poetic force, mysterious and arresting." —The Washington Post
"The Future Was Color probes evergreen postwar themes like McCarthyism and the specter of nuclear holocaust ... Nathan's style channels a kind of rapturous Fitzgeraldian opulence, where loneliness is romantic, disenchantment beautiful and the world exists in sensuous splendor." —The Wall Street Journal
"Patrick Nathan's The Future Was Color is a sexy, prescient novel about the lengths an artist must go to to protect their career. It's rare for a novel to be so emotionally gripping and intellectually rigorous, but it comes as no surprise that Nathan pulls it off. The Future Was Color is a love story; it's a thriller; it's an essential novel about creating art during war. This book fucks." —Isle McElroy, author of People Collide
"This brisk and delicious novel fearlessly tackles the vast subjects of the human impulse to make art and life in the atomic age. Heady stuff, so worth adding that The Future Was Color is among the sexiest books I've read. What more could any reader want?" —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind
This information about The Future Was Color was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Patrick Nathan is the author of Image Control and Some Hell, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Republic, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, The Baffler, and elsewhere. He lives in Minneapolis.
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