The Brooklyn Rail

Look at the expression of the boy in the photos on the ledge. When I was a child, I was always scared. I think now, was that because I was born in the moment of emergency? A moment that was not a moment at all; an emergency that stretched the breaking point to a series of palpable and protracted crises. The bomb, wherever it would come from, could drop at any given instant, an anxiety that produced only more weapons, reckless nuclear testing in areas that were neither isolated nor uninhabited, and the stockpiling of missiles with names like “Peacekeeper” designed not to preserve peace but to escalate the threat of war. Ethiopians were starving and Mexico City had collapsed and in Colombia, whole cities and the people that lived in them vanished within minutes, entombed by the flow of mud and volcanic debris that swept everything else away. By the end of the decade, AIDS had killed more men under forty-four than any other cause or condition, and though public awareness and education would become more familiar—alongside stigmatization—the death toll would continue to rise until 1996. By then, I was ten-and-a-half and had begun to write things down, to take notes, even if I couldn’t account for the fact that emergency was neither finite nor extraordinary but the normal order of business for powers that had, long before the year of my birth, chosen a political program over the well-being of people and the world in which we live, owing cataclysms both social and ecological to a profit margin or an idea of progress.

Patrick Nathan’s novel The Future Was Color (Counterpoint, 2025), newly republished in paperback, opens in Los Angeles in the autumn of 1956, as George, the book’s Hungarian protagonist, settles into the redundant comforts of eternal sunshine, writing screenplays for Hollywood’s studio system while navigating the anti-communism of McCarthyism and the illegality of being gay in the United States, where the criminalization of homosexuality would remain the national law, in the land of the free, until 2003, months after I turned eighteen. For George, as for the people of the country he had been shipped away from as a child in the wake of German genocidal advancement, October 23, 1956 becomes a watershed moment; the moment in which thousands of protesters took to the streets in Budapest, demanding a more democratic political system and freedom from Soviet oppression; the moment, like all moments, that radiates across space and time, entangling the lives of disparate people and their latent, heretofore unknown, unknowable, trajectories. “He felt electrocuted as he held that morning’s paper,” Nathan writes, in the voice of the unnamed narrator closely recounting George’s life. “He’d forgotten what it was to hope or believe, to imagine a future beyond the pale headlights of one’s aimless automobile. … As they departed their office and left the valley, the mountains were beginning to glow in the east. A new, terrible day. But how, George thought, could you care about such trivialities?”

Such trivialities include the temperatures of LA but also the cultural weather of Hollywood, whose studios, in George’s attestation, double as both US imperialist propaganda machines and informant dens, in which writers are encouraged to keep notebooks in their pockets in order to observe the unusual behavior of their colleagues. Suspicion, anxiety, and paranoia loom, discomposed by the intervention of desire, the immediacy of longing that Nathan smuggles into nearly every sentence of his page-turning novel. When readers are first introduced to George during a secondary cruise (post matinee), he is described as feeling “arrestable, deportable,” an everyday insecurity countered, in the same breath, with the philosophical acknowledgment: “But you can’t necessarily understand everyone with your eyes.” The eyes and what exceeds—or is, at times, betrayed by—them, is a particular focus. Nathan’s narrative appropriates George’s affinity for the movies to elevate the anecdotal to the realm of the screen, with all its promise, all its inherent deceptions. “The cinema of it made George feel watched,” Nathan writes, “as if he’d forgotten his lines. ‘I came out here to relax,’ he said, just to try the sound of it.”

In a hyper-mediated world of images meant to both arrest and move us, instability and uncertainty and the glamour and dread of fantasy commingle. Pages earlier, the complex management of public face is brilliantly demonstrated in Nathan’s deft construction of a routine conversation between George and his “favorite American,” intensifying their sexual flirtation and frustration while converging the omissions between two men pretending to be straight with the censorship of the studio system through which their story, their real story, would otherwise be illegible.

Doreen was fond of the place, Jack said. Even the village. She’d sent him here, as a matter of fact, for her favorite cigars. He held up a strangely dainty shopping bag and gestured two storefronts down. Cigars, George thought—another detail that felt lifelike. It never would’ve made it past the producers if he’d put it in a script. Old women don’t smoke cigars, they’d say, and slash it out. Madeline, George offered—and here he used her real name because it seemed unwise not to—was just praising the local businesses, particularly Mr. Houghton’s cheese shop. The selection was so sophisticated, had he ever stopped in? It reminded him, he lied, of Europe, of his youth.
“You say that as if you weren’t still a handsome man,” Jack said. For the first time, their little play failed, and a heat flushed up from Jack’s collar into his neck. George knew he’d caught it, too, and looked down.

Like George, who, after adopting the amateur role of “the man with the camera” during his life in New York City years before, has acquired a lifelong talent for watching—“a way of being kind to the lives of others”—Nathan is a keen observer of both body and mind, painting his novel with a mix of embodied, sensory-driven registers, metaphysical insights, and sage declarations, attending to George’s inner and outer worlds and the ways they fold in and widen in various settings and situations: a childhood in Budapest, a coming of age in Manhattan, a career in Los Angeles, a convalescence in Paris, which becomes the diegetic stage for the book’s listening voice—a narrative framing that is charged with the intimacy of companionship and the profundity of retrospective glances.

Nathan—whose previous books include the passionate and perceptive Image Control (Counterpoint, 2022), which links recurring strains of fascism to our contemporary and quotidian consumption of images—tethers George’s interest in the movies to their potential for social and political subversion. We learn, in the book’s first section, that George wants to write something real; that he’d finally felt, once again, as if his life was worth something. And before the story advances, as George and an ensemble cast gallivant from the beaches of Malibu toward a carefully timed and seismic climax in Las Vegas, the narrative moves backward, relating the back stories and back alleys and breathless beginnings that make such a life. Nathan’s choice to narrate events “out of order,” to move between geographies and artistic genealogies, is not coincidental or arbitrary but a testament to the material and psychic effects of war, colonization, and displacement across generations. It is no wonder that the painterly language of abstraction, as Paul Virilio once told Sylvère Lotringer, is indebted to the cataclysmic effects of the First World War, or that, for Gertrude Stein (see her 1926 address “Composition as Explanation” for but one example) as for other progressive artists and intellectuals of the interwar period, the preparations of war and fascism were seen as necessary ingredients for the inauguration of an American modernism.

One cannot behold a work of art without gazing upon the violence that may also be obscured by it. Perhaps this is also Nathan’s disquieting assessment, by linking an undercurrent of queer art in New York City with popcorn Hollywood production through the figure of George and his aspiration for cinema to reorganize the coordinates of the possible. Like Jacques Rancière, who has long understood that art cannot be reducible to its medium—the idea of any given art, for instance, far predating its technical means—Nathan’s novel shows us how, in George’s alternative vision for cinema and his promiscuous version of a heretofore hidden postwar culture, the “work” of art is to in fact destabilize the aesthetic regime that it depends upon for its very identity. (Even as a child in Budapest does George understand the relationship between the “pastimes” of science and art that link aestheticization with murder: the containment and cataloging and labeling of animals in the zoological gardens beyond his home, a landscape in which readers can’t help but glimpse the nascent drafting of Germany’s “Final Solution” that would soon follow.) George, as irremediably other, as orphan and immigrant, as “the man with the camera” but also the scriptwriter that provides the camera with its series of instructions, is what I’ve elsewhere referred to as a “third figure”—both storyteller and translator: the foreigner who tells the story of how they arrived (in Budapest, in New York City, in Los Angeles, in Paris…) and thus passes it on for distinct audiences. George, in Nathan’s polygonal novel, is both a bridge between cultures and a channel to the future that he has implicitly understood—even divined—and which he will never see.

Back in the past, in New York City, where he arrives, unbeknownst to him, as a stray, he’ll meet a group of artists and intellectuals called the Three Forty-Seven, named after the address they share; on 6th Avenue and West 8th Street, affectionately dubbed “The New York School,” he’ll encounter both his aesthetic education and his sexual awakening, arriving at the Waldorf Cafeteria wearing his most tattered shirt, “to simulate an age, a shabbiness, to match those around him.” Nathan is quick to point out that George, though not an actor by trade, is not beyond his own imitation game. Performance serves as a leitmotif for the novel, whether the specific act of passing in environments where it is not safe to be who one is, or the routine posturing, well before the intensification and stratification of social media, of the persona familiar to the public and estranged to one’s self. The narrator of our present, who has endured not just the avatars of AI influencers but also the environmental precarity of normalized wildfire, forever chemicals, and airborne particulates, knows this well.

In grief, one is handed the opportunity, wanted or not, to meditate on happiness, on where joy falls in time. No matter who we are, we spend much if not most of our lives pretending, and to pretend—even about something as mundane as fluids and membranes and the chemicals they call to, the brain cells ready to receive their good news—is not a path to happiness. … Too much happiness, especially a happiness like theirs, is forgotten. It dies with a man like George, and I don’t know that anyone needs a reminder of a different sort of fact—that a lot of men like George did die, long before their time.

The coterie of New York City artists whom George will befriend—playwrights, painters, poets—think of themselves as counterpoints to La-La Land, immune and opposed to, as one character remarks, “that California brainlessness.” George, as a double outsider—queer, immigrant—negotiates East Coast erudite pretensions and, later, West Coast celebrity elitism, through a sincerity and idealism that will not—despite cultural and personal tragedies along the way—be extinguished. The Hungarian Revolution would become, in the papers, “an insurrection”: stamped out and cast away into cultural oblivion, as the public moved onto other, more fashionable, things (the Suez Crisis). Paul, George’s first love, would disappear from New York City, becoming, when he resurfaced years later, first a walking zombie, then an unseen corpse: a failed medical experiment in so-called conversion therapy. George’s own parents would never end up joining him in New York City after all; they die, like innumerable others before history, beyond the page, beyond the scope of documentation. Though the reinscribing of historical record through the collaborative call and response of oral testimony, is, above all, Nathan’s mission. Taking a cue, perhaps, from German philosopher Walter Benjamin and his aim, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”—the text, not coincidentally, that got Benjamin, while already in exile, denationalized— that “historical construction” be “devoted to the memory of the nameless,” Nathan orients his prose with compassion, sensitivity, and emotional intelligence, avoiding sentimentalism to honor the idiosyncrasies and imperfections and manifold sensibilities of his characters. In one of the earliest moments of textual encounter with the novel’s unnamed narrator, toward the very end of the book’s first section, Nathan writes, transparently and unapologetically, of such ambitions:

In my final comments about George’s life before he left, with his new friends, for that long irreversible night in Las Vegas, I’d like to point out that history is not for everyone. Or perhaps it’s better to say that not everyone is for history, which is at best selectively amnesiac and, at worst, exclusive as Madeline’s yacht club. These people and their lives, their accomplishments, are not written about elsewhere because they are not the kind of people it is convenient for history—that is, by history, the conscious efforts of organizations, governments, and institutions with a politics of their own, however objective they claim to be, however unbiased—to record or remember. They are not, in a word, winners. And because they lost, it is their lives that are—or nearly were—lost to us.

The depth of experience, the weight of it, the shape and density, the volume and color, is not lost on Nathan’s narrator, who, we learn only in the novel’s final pages, is serving not just as chronicler of George’s past, but as caregiver as George awaits, not without the comfort and gratitude brought by kinship and communion, his imminent death. Death and decay permeate the narrative; so, too, does pleasure and happiness—“To see someone experience joy, he said—it tells you everything you need to know about a person,” the narrator recounts, “perhaps because it’s so rare to witness.” Likewise, George confronts unbearable loss through unspoken resignation and, later, a resistance, as storyteller, to absolute obliteration. There is something that survives, which is the story being told as it is repeated to us in the book we are reading. “There was a reverence about it,” Nathan writes of the letter George had received from Paul and shown to the narrator, “and a terrible threat of being lost.” “‘It doesn’t take much,’ George told me as he folded it back into its place, ‘to vanish from this world, and from history altogether.’” And indeed, things and people will vanish, become abandoned, deteriorate, get misplaced or ruined. George’s hallowed photographs of Paul will sit in the dark of an unopened box shelved in a studio that will flood unexpectedly. Letters to dear friends back in New York City will remain, though delivered to readers post facto, “unsendable.” The future, after the atomic bomb, as it becomes frighteningly clear to every guest at an otherwise unassuming end of the world fête in Las Vegas, “is done with.” Though nothing, no thing, is beyond redemption.

Nathan has a knack for distilling the microhistories of the minor and the marginalized, of extracting both their imminence and their secret afterlives. In an early scene at a dinner party in Malibu on someone else’s balcony, George and Jack, an officemate at the studio—both closeted and yet unaware of one another’s affinities—are deep in tipsy conversation before a glass slips from Jack’s fingers and vanishes, “without a sound,” Nathan writes, “into the brush below. Someday it’d be found, pummeled into a little gemstone. George imagined the archaeology of it, the narrative of lust they’d miss, whoever found it, in whatever new shape it made.” There can be no beauty, nor love—the new shape made by the impact of the falling object—Nathan wants us to understand, without an indelible, nay, unforgettable, trauma. George admits: “It was obscene to ask for remembrance,” and yet, in recounting his life, in reanimating his dear friends, living or dead yet once again alive, he responds to his younger self’s forlorn restlessness, somnolent and castaway in LA—“Why had he done nothing with his life? All these years and opportunities …”—by restoring these people, himself included, with the right to be remembered.