Publishers Weekly
04/22/2024
The titillating latest from Nathan (Some Hell) portrays the life of a gay Hungarian Jew in Hollywood. In 1956, George Curtis is drawn to fellow screenwriter Jack Turner, the sight of whose body stings George “like the opulence of the homes in Beverly Hills.” After George and Jack visit actor Madeline Morrison in Malibu, Jack tempts George into acting on his attraction, sparking a romance that offers both men the promise of happiness. From there, Nathan flashes back to 17-year-old George’s arrival in 1944 New York City as György Kertész. The young refugee cruises for sex in public toilets at a time when men were entrapped and arrested for doing so, and eventually becomes involved in a bittersweet affair that prompts him to reinvent himself and move to California. Back in 1956, George, Jack, and Madeline attend a debauched party in Las Vegas that turns dangerous after many partygoers take copious amounts of LSD. Nathan nimbly interweaves the period’s zeitgeist into the narrative, including the Budapest Revolution and the fear of the nuclear bomb. The hopscotch structure dilutes some of the emotional impact, though each episode captivates, including a finale set in 1960s Paris. This portrait of an artist in the making dazzles. (June)
From the Publisher
Los Angeles Times, A Must Read Book of the Month
Named a Most Anticipated Book by Los Angeles Daily News, Literary Hub, LGBTQ Reads, The Rumpus, & The Millions
"A work of muscular poetic force, mysterious and arresting." —Charles Arrowsmith, 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." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“A riveting novel that explores basic existential questions ranging from 'what is life’s purpose?' to 'how can there be light and happiness in dark times?' History was ruptured in the 1950s; how could life go on after the revelation of World War II death camps and the creation of a bomb that could incinerate a city’s population with a single blast? These questions make The Future Was Color timely in 2024 America.” —Lorraine Berry, Los Angeles Times
“Nathan employs the timeless ‘a stranger comes to town’ plot, as a gay Hungarian Jew named George Curtis gets invited to a chic Malibu house for a 1950s Hollywood heyday. However, George’s backstory in Manhattan and future in Paris bookend that bacchanalia and show how dark the shadow of McCarthyism and its ‘Lavender Scare’ loomed over queer society—as other paranoias of the day did over other people, reminding readers that things have not changed enough.” —Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times
"Everything I look for in a book: a unique and startling voice, a queer protagonist and a deep understanding of a particular time and place." —Ilana Masad, NPR
"Nathan’s L.A. noir novel spans decades and countries and delves into the power of art, self-reinvention, and the tether between the personal and the political." —Emily St. Martin, Los Angeles Daily News
"Rich, scintillating . . . In lush and achingly precise prose, drenched in loneliness and longing, Nathan masterfully renders George’s struggle to reckon with the relationship between spectacle and violence, artifice and self-knowledge, remembrance and possibility." —Nathan Goldman, Jewish Currents
"If you enjoyed the Showtime series Fellow Travelers and are looking for more queer stories that blend the personal with the political, The Future Was Color should fit the bill nicely." —Cindy White, The A.V. Club
"Patrick Nathan’s second novel, The Future Was Color, makes facing and accepting our perpetual apocalypse feel sexy . . . Sentence by intricately dazzling sentence, Nathan renders 1950’s Los Angeles cinematically, following George as he navigates the cool, breezy, laconic tensions and anxieties that fracture and bind the small world of Hollywood in the McCarthy era . . . A novel about witnessing, again and again, our own destruction, and yet it magically allows us to face it each time and feel hope, to feel we must engage with the world we share even as it self-destructs." —Stephen Patrick Bell, Foglifter
"Even as he stacks the weight of past and future horrors before us, Nathan’s language rebukes the privilege of pearl-clutching despair by carving out gaps for intersubjectivity. His descriptions are so visceral that one can almost feel the flushed cheek rise from a line . . . Patrick Nathan counts among the dreamers—those guided by a compass whose true north is care and creation . . . Goosebumps appear on my arms when trying to describe how much I needed this novel that I could never have imagined." —Alina Stefanescu, Los Angeles Review of Books
"This complex, compassionate novel is an impressive achievement for a young author who has a promising career ahead of him." —Daniel A. Burr, The Gay & Lesbian Review
"If Fellow Travelers has you curious for more in-depth historical fiction on the McCarthy era and the lavender scare, look no further than Patrick Nathan’s new novel, set in 1950s Hollywood." —Tiernan Bertrand-Essington, Queerty
"Everything Patrick Nathan writes is a banger, whether it be a wrenching coming-of-age novel, a work of criticism excoriating our country’s authoritarian obsession with images, or even his incisive Substack. Expect no less from the author’s second novel, which follows a closeted screenwriter in McCarthy-era Hollywood and the big screen starlet who seems to offer a sort of salvation. A monster mash between Sunset Boulevard and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.” —Michelle Hart, Electric Literature
"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!" —Brittany Allen, Literary Hub
"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." —Dave Wheeler, Shelf Awareness (starred review)
"George is a well-realized character whose interesting life will hold the reader’s attention." —Booklist
"This portrait of an artist in the making dazzles." —Publishers Weekly
"Ambitious, perspicacious, and humane." —Kirkus Reviews
"A gay Hungarian immigrant writing crappy monster movies in the McCarthy-era Hollywood studio system gets swept up by a famous actress and brought to her estate in Malibu to write what he really cares about—and realizes he can never escape his traumatic past. Sunset Boulevard is shaking." —John H. Maher, The Millions
“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
"Patrick Nathan's The Future Was Color is a sumptuous novel that captures the class, guilt, art, sex, and politics of 1950's Los Angeles with deft tenderness. Nathan is a master storyteller who navigates the complex world of Hollywood while exposing the darkness beneath the glittering surface. A stunning novel that illuminates an era." —Mark Haber, author of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss
“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
"Nathan's gripping historical novel reminds us of the power of art in the face of a cruel and uncaring world. This is a fiercely intelligent and serious moral work that every artist should read. I was swept up in this story and didn't want to let it go.” ––Garrard Conley, author of All the World Beside and Boy Erased
Kirkus Reviews
2024-04-05
Nathan’s novel begins as the story of a semicloseted gay screenwriter in 1950s Hollywood, but the scope grows to encompass issues of identity, social mores, and the survival of humankind.
The dense first 100 pages recount a 1956 turning point in George Curtis’ life. Aware of his otherness, the gay, Hungarian-born Jewish émigré tries to keep a low profile, away from the Hollywood limelight. Then the Hungarian uprising against the USSR compels him to write a serious political/philosophical essay. Leaving his studio job scripting B movies, he takes refuge at the glamorous mansion of a married but sexually predatory pair of movie stars. George’s sardonic wit—tinged with nostalgia, loneliness, and loss—sets a moody noir tone as drugs, sex, and Cold War paranoia of nuclear dimensions rock his previously buttoned-up life. Suddenly the narration shifts to New York City in 1944. Sixteen-year-old George arrives as a parentless refugee. The roots of his adult tendencies—his capacity to reinvent himself as needed, the double life he maintains as a homosexual, his fear of his capacity for deep affection, his (or the author’s) tendency to pontificate about concepts like the ethics of destruction—become evident, and readers realize with surprise that the George who was so apparently jaded in California was not yet 30 years old. Poor and uneducated, adolescent George thrusts himself into Manhattan’s bohemian world of artists and writers. He thrives until a combination of misfortunes, including a tragic love affair, forces his escape to California. Now hopscotching past California, the narration picks up in late-20th-century Paris, where 40-year-old George has moved and, for a while, achieved a satisfying life. Though George struggles as a gay man and an immigrant, the message here is that the fear of loneliness and annihilation are universal and existential while happiness and love, however fleeting, are available to all.
Ambitious, perspicacious, and humane.
