“The Future Was Color” by Patrick Nathan
May 1, 2024
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LARB Book Club is thrilled to announce our Summer 2024 Book Club title: The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan! To join the LARB Book Club, where we put you in conversation with editors and members and send a copy of the selected title to your door, become a LARB Friend member today. Join by May 31 and your membership will be matched by the Whiting Foundation up to a total of $20,000! The Summer Book Club Discussion will take place in mid-July. RSVP link to be announced.
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.
“Like the best of Andrew Holleran and Marguerite Duras, Patrick Nathan’s new novel changed how I see the world through its desire, its precision, its porthole to a time and place that may otherwise have been lost. Achingly beautiful, The Future Was Color helps us confront the horrors of our own climate catastrophe by understanding how many times the world has already ended, especially for queer people. In Nathan’s view, art is necessary, but the best life is one spent giving and receiving pleasure, and, through pleasure, love.” —Joseph Osmundson, author of Virology and Grandview
“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
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.
Join our Book Club today to get The Future Was Color plus our next three staff-curated selections, as well as access to our quarterly discussions hosted by LARB staff. To view previous Book Club picks, please visit the LARB Book Club page.
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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.
¤
“Like the best of Andrew Holleran and Marguerite Duras, Patrick Nathan’s new novel changed how I see the world through its desire, its precision, its porthole to a time and place that may otherwise have been lost. Achingly beautiful, The Future Was Color helps us confront the horrors of our own climate catastrophe by understanding how many times the world has already ended, especially for queer people. In Nathan’s view, art is necessary, but the best life is one spent giving and receiving pleasure, and, through pleasure, love.” —Joseph Osmundson, author of Virology and Grandview
“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
¤
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.
¤
Join our Book Club today to get The Future Was Color plus our next three staff-curated selections, as well as access to our quarterly discussions hosted by LARB staff. To view previous Book Club picks, please visit the LARB Book Club page.
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