THE FUTURE WAS COLOR: A NOVEL BY PATRICK NATHAN Review by Matthew Lemas

THE FUTURE WAS COLOR: A NOVEL BY PATRICK NATHAN

Review by Matthew Lemas

Publisher: Counterpoint Press 

Publication Date: June 04, 2024

ISBN: 9781640096240 

Pages: 224

Creating Art in the Nuclear Age: Patrick Nathan’s The Future Was Color

Of the many lessons wrought from Putin’s now two-and-half-year invasion of Ukraine, perhaps the most existential is how the world did change on August 6, 1945, that humankind had proved the capacity for its own destruction, and that such a world is one we still very much live in today. 

Art in the last year has only served to further remind us of this reality, as much as one would like to forget it.  Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer comes to mind, of course. But just as deftly done is Patrick Nathan’s latest novel, The Future Was Color, which interrogates the possibility of meaning in the perpetual shadow of nuclear destruction, and the role art could play, if any, in treating such an existence. 

The novel opens in Los Angeles in October 1956, where Hungarian immigrant George Curtis (formerly György Kertész) works as a screenwriter, pumping out monster movies for a major film studio. While he enjoys the genre as a means of revealing humanity’s inherent desire for destruction (“We want to burn, to be disintegrated,” the book opens, “to watch our creations … bludgeoned and brained, thrown, crushed, but above all burned”), he finds himself otherwise unfulfilled by the commercial restraints of sappy writing and dull acting. He watches, too, as his home country erupts into turmoil, precipitated by a people’s revolution against Soviet rule, and he wonders what purpose his existence serves among the banality of Hollywood: “He wanted to write something real, something that would be part of a conversation.”  

Then comes Madeline, an actor-turned-collector of “interesting” people, who offers George a room in her Malibu home so that he can focus on the political writing that gives him purpose. It is there, in his glass room overlooking the water, that he returns to the thoughts that opened the novel: “Destruction is illuminating in man’s ethical darkness. It lights the path—the same path we take toward creation.” The words deliberately eschew mere despair for some form of renewed existence amid ruin, the idea of art rising from one’s own ashes. However, such thoughts are never sustained for long, as George is quickly drawn into a world of sun-drenched ennui and moving parties fueled by ample drinks and Dexedrine, with politics somewhere far, far away.

Naturally, the life of the lotus eater is not one George imagined for himself when, at sixteen, his parents shipped him out of Hungary in 1944 for New York, and in the book’s middle, we leave Los Angeles for its East Coast rival. Whereas 1950s L.A. is marked by simple hedonism, postwar New York proves far more intellectually intoxicating. George is surrounded by the so-called “New York School” of artists, and he attempts to become one himself, cycling through painting and photography before finally stumbling on writing. Indeed, it is there, amid the heated discussions that are nowhere to be found in later studio backlots, that one painter returns to the book’s persistent question, this time in the wake of the Holocaust: “How was an artist … supposed to reckon with what happened? How does a person go on painting?” 

In many ways, it is this very inquiry that guides Nathan’s project. How does a person go on writing in this renewed nuclear age of 2024, and to what end? The book is largely historical in scope but, like any good text of that kind, proves particularly pertinent to present realities. One wonders as they read whether there is a purpose to art in the midst of contemporary, human-made maladies—ongoing global violence, impending climate disasters, the threat of nuclear war—only to be reminded by the novel’s end that it is these very maladies that spark such art in the first place. In other words, without the world as the artist’s muse, there would be no art, and once more, then, we return to the novel’s theme: creation in the face of destruction. 

Such contemporary relevance extends, too, to Nathan’s exploration of queerness, which serves as an inextricable element to the text’s broader existential questions. As a gay man existing in mid-twentieth century America, George—and the political freedoms he gains by escaping Hungary—are only as strong as his ability to evade police detection amid the shadowy stairwells and bathroom stalls that mark New York queer life. When one artist chides him on his lack of discretion, George asks, “But how can one avoid a walking trap?” Such questions, of course, remain not only in the past, proving particularly relevant in an era of new anti-queer legislation, and one finds oneself continually touched by stray observations, such as when George sits in a bar full of straight men: “To be alone with men is, for men like us, the call to give the performance of a lifetime. And we are called far too often.” As too many know, the play continues on, and without ever limiting itself to strictly a “queer novel,” The Future Was Color probes the much-needed realities of past and present queerness. 

If one had not already noticed, the usual cliches regarding L.A. are all at play here: Los Angeles is vapid and dull; New York is grimy and intellectual. The narrator notes how there is never bad weather (“How else would it people itself?” he asks, as if sunshine were the region’s only benefit), and, seemingly on cue, there is even a brief diatribe from George against car culture. Yet, this can almost certainly be forgiven, for not only do such characterizations largely stay true to the monied circle Nathan focuses on within L.A., as well as George’s general melancholy, but when we ultimately return to that sect in a Las Vegas bacchanalia in the book’s latter third, the writing is such a tour de force that one forgets any prior missteps altogether. 

Ultimately, The Future Was Color never lets one forget the specter of ruin facing us all in this resurgent era of nuclear anxiety. However, the work tells us we can claim more than a mere sword of Damocles in our midst, but an ever-present opportunity for creation. Not surprisingly, then, the most poignant moments of the novel are when the narration indulges this possibility of hope: 

“It was better, George realized, to associate with optimists, with people who not only believed in the good of the future but believed it was they, in their learning and their ambition, who could reach it … you want to follow someone who knows where they are going, and who wants, with great love to go there. Utopia is not a state; it is a compass.”

Perhaps it is the artists, then, who, even in the midst of our contemporary destruction, can keep such bearings straight. 

Patrick Nathan‘s first novel, Some Hell, was published by Graywolf Press in February of 2018. His second book, Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist, arrived in August of 2021 from Counterpoint Press. He has written for the New York Times and the Boston Globe, and published short fiction and essays in American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review Online, the New Republic, Gulf Coast, the Baffler, Boulevard, Pacific Standard, the Paris Review Daily, Ninth Letter, Real Life, and elsewhere. He lives in Minneapolis.

Matthew Lemas is a writer living in Southern California. He earned an MFA in creative writing and an MA in English from Chapman University, where he also teaches first-year composition.

6 November 2024