On McCarthyism and Malibu: ‘The Future Was Color’ is not your typical beach read

Patrick Nathan’s “The Future Was Color” is not your typical breezy summer beach read.

Yet lovers of literary fiction will still want to take summer’s long, hot days to luxuriate in the novel’s prose and its steamy eroticism, not to mention its thoughtful and challenging contemplations on art, politics and, well, the entire human condition.

When this moody, noir-ish story opens, readers meet George, a Hungarian immigrant who has managed to find middling success writing monster movies as a hack screenwriter. He is gay and Jewish, and this is the McCarthy era in Hollywood, so danger and betrayal lurk around every corner. When a wealthy actress past her prime offers George a room at her Malibu estate so he can pen an essay, things get complicated: He falls down a rabbit hole of nihilism and hedonism that leads him back to a past he thought he’d put behind him.

The novel not only leaps in time from past to present; it leaps from Los Angeles to New York, Las Vegas to Paris. Nathan’s device for holding it all together is a savvy, unnamed narrator who unspools the stories George told him and adds his own insights.

“Somebody asked me, ‘What parts of the book were hard to write?’ I thought about it and I was like, ‘Honestly, none of it,’” Nathan said recently in a phone interview from his home in Minneapolis. “The writing process, the actual drafting of it, took a while to find the right voice. But then once I had the voice, the draft just kind of fell out of me.”

Nathan said he’s spent a lot of time in Southern California — including a turn as a would-be child actor: “I lived there when I was 14 for, like, two months. You can say, ‘Failed child actor writes novel about Malibu.’ The whole, you know, ‘Desperate mom moves charismatic child out to Los Angeles. Spends life savings. Gets nowhere. Moves back home to the Midwest with tail between legs,’” Nathan said. “I’ve had, I guess, both a soft spot for and a grudge against (Los Angeles) ever since.”

Story’s stakes raised

Old sci-fi posters on the walls of Nathan’s favorite Minneapolis diner (The Bad Waitress, now closed) added a key element of inspiration for “The Future Was Color.” As he writes in the book’s acknowledgments, the posters “made me wonder who wrote such movies, and why.”

“I had a lot of the book already in my head, what I call, you know, the texture of the book that’s all provided by the kind of things that I’m interested in, the things that I’ve been reading, the things that I’ve been paying attention to, etc., etc.,” Nathan explained. “Then I saw a name on the poster of the 1958 ‘Earth vs. the Spider’ film. I knew that was without a doubt a Hungarian name. So I immediately had this notion of, like, OK, what is a Hungarian doing in 1950s Los Angeles?”

The answers were “pretty clear,” he said: the terrible legacies of the Holocaust and World War II. And they immediately raised the stakes of the story.

“I instantly wondered, what if you take this person who has felt their world implode — everything they know being destroyed, his family disappearing from him, his cultured, cosmopolitan society where everything can be discussed and worked out, basically being torn apart by stupidity,” Nathan said. “Then he goes to this backwater on the Pacific Coast and kind of drifts around as though there are no problems in life whatsoever. What does that do psychologically to a person? The question really captivated me.”

And then, Nathan made the character queer and closeted — this amid The Lavender Scare, a campaign to rid homosexual people from government service that paralleled McCarthyism in the 1950s.

From there, the emotional stakes of the story “just got bigger and bigger,” he said. “But I also knew that the book couldn’t be a sweeping 400-page saga. I really, really wanted it to be very, very tight — very, very energetic. So I tried to make it as compressed as possible, but without feeling dense.”

The story’s as-told-to narrative technique and tone might remind some readers of a similar style used in the classic 1967 novel “A Sport and a Pastime” by James Salter. In fact, that’s exactly what inspired Nathan.

“I was reading that novel when I got the idea: What if somebody else is telling the story? It solved one of the big stylistic problems I was having when I was trying to find my way into the book: Originally, it was told in third-person narration, and that just didn’t have the right rhythm; it didn’t have the right style,” Nathan said. “But then being able to put in those recursive pauses — ‘George told me,’ ‘George said’ — it slowed the writing down. Then I was able to add commentary; then I was able to play with the concept of history. I was able to dilate time.”

Nathan’s 2018 debut novel “Some Hell,” about a queer young man struggling with his sexuality and the suicide of his father, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. But readers might find this new novel more akin in thematic ways to his 2020 nonfiction book “Image Control: Art, Fascism and the Right to Resist.”

Nathan has described “Image Control” as being about “our relationship with art, why we make art, and the right to have an inner life, which I think is the foundation for all other forms of resistance” — which could also be an apt distillation of “The Future Was Color.”

“The joke about a lot of writers is that they just write the same book over and over again,” Nathan said wryly, adding that the reality of writing is more complicated than the joke.

Take the metaphor of a prism, he said: When you turn it even a little bit, the light shifts and you see the same things through it differently.

“And you’re like, Oh, wow; there’s so much more here than I thought,” Nathan said.