Of all the LGBTQ novels I’ve read during the summer of 2024 (some of which were unfinishable), there are only two I’ve been consistently recommending without hesitation.
The first is “Housemates” by Emma Copley Eisenberg. The second is “The Future Was Color” (Counterpoint, 2024) by Patrick Nathan. I’m getting choked up just thinking about the beauty and scope of this novel, all of which fit neatly into 209 pages. Spanning a nearly 80-year period, from the 1940s to the present day, Lambda Literary Award finalist Nathan, takes readers from Los Angeles (Hollywood) to New York to Las Vegas to Paris, all the while seamlessly incorporating significant historical events, as he tells the extraordinary story of protagonist George, a gay Hungarian immigrant. Nathan was gracious enough to make time for a summertime interview.
Patrick, I’d like to begin with a little background, if you don’t mind. You are presently based in Minneapolis. How long have you lived there, and what do you like best about the city?
Aside from a decade in Kansas City when I was very young, I’ve lived in Minneapolis, more or less, my whole life. I was born in the Twin Cities, went to middle and high school here, then college, and ever since, I seem to have had a lot of trouble leaving.
Your new novel “The Future Was Color” is divided into four sections: Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas, and Paris. Were they written in the order in which they appear in the book?
They were. I knew from the beginning that the book would have a New York interlude, a sort of origin story for George, and that the interlude would take place between his time in Los Angeles and his night in Las Vegas. The idea to end it in Paris came a little later, but I was still working on the LA section when I realized where to take it. So, I wrote the LA section with all these other places in mind, and then New York, then Vegas, etc., as a sort of vertical structure. Generally, with fiction, I find it difficult to jump around or write out of sequence. For me, it has to build – and there has to be some urgency or excitement to keep me moving toward those other sections. If I were to write the end, for example, because I felt that day like writing the end of the novel, what would I work toward? It helps me keep the book free of filler, I guess.
Each section incorporates historically significant subjects. The Red Scare/McCarthyism and the Hungarian Revolution (Los Angeles), World War II and concentration camps (NY), the nuclear bomb test (Las Vegas), and AIDS (Paris). Are you a student of history, or did you become one for the purpose of this book?
I guess part of writing the book was realizing just how much in love with history I’ve always been – or at least have been for the last several years. My reading habits are pretty broad, and most of what appears in the novel is information (I like to call it texture) that I’ve picked up over years of reading. The only specific or methodical research I did for the book was reading Kevin Johnson’s “The Lavender Scare,” to get a sense of the climate or mystique surrounding cruising at the time as well as how the public reacted to the various arrests (some of them sting operations), and Victor Sebestyen’s “Twelve Days,” for details about the Hungarian Revolution, about which I knew pretty much nothing until I began writing this book. The rest of the book’s research is the same research I do for any novel, which is to look at maps, check various dates or times, and in one case verify the chemical composition of semen.
With that in mind, would you say that this is your most researched book?
I wouldn’t, actually. While my previous book, “Image Control: Social Media, Fascism, and the Dismantling of Democracy,” was also a product of interest rather than scholarship, the additional research required to synthesize all those disparate topics and obsessions was, comparatively, quite extensive. I had a reading list that just kept growing and growing; the more I read, the more I added to it, until eventually I just had to give up and call the book finished.
An unnamed narrator guides us through the story of George Curtis, a queer Hungarian immigrant who becomes a successful Hollywood screenwriter. Why did you choose to utilize the unnamed narrator device?
Initially, this was a style issue – a rhythm issue. I can’t really move forward with any piece of writing – story or novel or essay – without having the voice, so it takes me a long time to get past the first paragraph, then the first page. I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite those opening lines until they sound right to me. My earliest attempts at the first pages of this novel were in the close third-person, but the voice still wasn’t showing up, no matter how many times I tried to get at it. It wasn’t until I started inserting those recursive phrases – “he told me” or “George said” or “I remember” – that the sentences felt breezy enough, that the narrative opened up enough, for me to actually keep going and tell the story. Then I realized everything I could do with a first-person narrator, and what that would mean for the book’s sense of time – its elasticity. This is around the time that the Paris section came into the project as well, as that city and this narrator are so closely related. The novel is about the life of a European living in the 20th century who ventures west and returns east, told by an American living in the 21st century who has ventured east and, by the time we hear the story, returned west. That they meet in Paris, where the novel ends, felt like a way to unify all of that.
In the Los Angeles section, following the success of George’s movie “Death From Above,” there is mention of a kind of “Death From Below” sequel. Is this a way for you to comment on the environment?
Unexpectedly, a lot of environmental themes made their way into the novel, which I guess was inevitable if I was going to get close to George’s nuclear anxiety – an anxiety prevalent among all people, worldwide, of that generation. Today, with our pervasive sense of climate change, it seems we’ve reinvented for ourselves the existential dread we briefly left behind at the end of the previous century, trading one axe hovering over our necks for another. Or just adding another one, I guess, since nuclear weapons are still a global crisis that, as Elaine Scarry says, amounts to worldwide psychological torture. It’s not hard to feel like climate change fulfills this same model of torture, which I wrote about in an essay for the “Baffler” a couple of years ago – and similarly lacks any kind of accountability. It felt like an accurate parallel, then, to lead the book from the nuclear age into our own, where we witness one climate disaster after another with this false sense of powerlessness, as if “there’s nothing we can do” when in fact we do have agency.
Poets are a presence in the New York and Las Vegas (i.e. “too many poets to count” on p. 166) sections. Your language throughout the novel could also be described as poetic (the line “smoky seas of malevolent teeth,” for example). In addition to being a writer of prose, do you also write poetry?
I haven’t finished a poem in a very long time, but I do start them once in a while – and used to write them regularly. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a musician, a sort of “the whole band is me” kind of thing, à la Nine Inch Nails, and wrote and recorded a few albums in my basement. While I’d written a lot of poems by then, the usual poems a lot of teenagers tend to write, the lyrics for that band sort of cultivated my earliest interest in writing poetry as a cardinal aspect of life, which then spilled into fiction, and later into essays.
In the Las Vegas section, there is a description of Paul, someone to whom George was very close, who after undergoing shock treatment at the request of his family, as being a man who “had been dismantled and destroyed.” This made me think of conversion therapy and how it is still a threat in some places. Please say something about that.
“The great problem of torture is the definition of torture” is how that third section starts, as there’s not much of a doubt, in my mind – going off my own definition of conversion therapy – that it constitutes psychosexual torture. It would be anachronistic to call it, in the book, “conversion therapy,” but it’s more or less what was going on at the time, with a lot of men, and the doctors administering this torture backed it up with a lot of science, a lot of certainty. People are always so certain.
At the beginning of the Paris section, you write about the Canadian wildfires of 2023. Was this a way, after being specific about other time periods, for you to place the conclusion of the book in time?
The wildfire, mentioned briefly in that one paragraph, is meant to be a sort of anytime anywhere kind of thing, but definitely “the present day” – whatever that may mean for a reader. There’s a mention of being accustomed, by then, to wearing masks as well, so we are, by that time in the narrative, caught up with wherever and whenever the narrator is living, post-COVID, and after wildfires have become a perennial summer occurrence. There’s a brief allusion, too, very early in the novel, to the riots of 2020 – so whenever the narrator is telling this story, it’s decidedly after 2020. As I said before, it was a way to dilate time, as well as relate these various eras to one another – even to shuffle them like cards.
It’s also fitting that a novel in which movies play such a large role is extremely cinematic. If there was a movie version of “The Future Was Color,” who would you like to see as George? As Jack, Madeleine, and Paul?
The strange thing for me about writing fiction is that, while I see gestures very well, I don’t see faces. For me, none of these characters has a face, so it’s always hard to answer the “who” question like this. But given the gestures and the poise and the voice, I do think that Rosamund Pike would be the perfect Madeline.
Have you started working on or thinking about your next book project?
I have one novel – a real beast – that’s three drafts in, but in desperate need of rewrites, so it’s unreadable at the moment. I’m also using my Substack to incubate another nonfiction book – this one about the contestation of wills between individuals and corporations, and how that contestation is style. Aside from those two books, there are three other novels in the pipeline. I actually wrote “Future” as a way to avoid rewriting that monster novel, and maybe what’ll happen is that I’ll end up writing another procrastination novel to avoid whatever it is that’s giving me such a hard time. I wouldn’t mind. I’ve never had such a great time writing a book as I had writing “Future,” mostly because it wasn’t work. It was avoiding work. Maybe I can avoid work forever.
