The Future Was Color: A Novel

Written by Patrick Nathan

Narrated by Oscar Reyes

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 LA 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 a decade prior.



Spanning from 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Jul 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781696616652

Reviews for The Future Was Color

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An unnamed narrator is telling us about the life of George Curtis, born György Kertész in 1930s Hungary, as he navigates life as an immigrant, Jew, orphan, gay man, and creative from the late 1940s on. Avoiding the McCarthy-era hunts for reds, gays, etc. Nathan touches on many topics of the time--including electroshock treatments.

I found this book perfectly readable, but also unbelievable. Could a 16-year-old Jewish Hungarian boy have been sent by his parents to New York in 1944 as is his story? I find this impossible to believe, but that is the basis for his whole story. How could a non-English-speaking 16-year-old, living with a middle-aged Hungarian woman, have learned English well enough and made enough connections (while also shedding his former selves each time he moves) to be writing successful B movie scripts in Hollywood in the 50s? Or is this meant to be a fully unreliable narrator (or is George himself unreliable)--in which case, what's the point? If this is mythmaking, I need ot know more about the myth and the truth.