The Future Was Color

A dazzling novel about making art, desire, and the inextricable link between the personal and the political set against the decadence of post-war Los Angeles, for readers of Garth Greenwell and Eve Babitz

George is a Hungarian immigrant working as a studio hack writing monster movies in 1950s Los Angeles. He must navigate the McCarthy era studio system filled with possible Communists and spies; the life of closeted men along Sunset Boulevard; the inability of the era to disassemble love from persecution and guilt. But when a famous actress named Madeleine offers George a “writing residency” at her estate in Malibu to work on the political writing he cares most deeply about, his world changes dramatically. Soon it’s drinks by the pool every night, pleasure in every direction, and Madeleine carrying him like an ornament into a class of postwar L.A. 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 endless bacchanalia covers a gnawing hole shelled wide by the horror of the war they’d thought they left behind. Beneath his newfound relationships lie the pernicious forces of the American political project. And what George can never escape: his past as György, the queer Jew who fled Budapest before the war, landing in New York all alone a decade prior. In New York as in California, the people he loves aren’t what they seem—and neither is his adopted country, one pretending to have transcended bigotry, authoritarianism, and violence. It is a novel as well as a historical document, upending our perceptions of just how personal the political can be.

Spanning from sun-drenched Los Angeles, to 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 making art and reinventing the self, post-war American decadence, and the psychosis that lingers in a world that’s seen the bomb.

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