Close Reads is an essays column exploring a specific page, paragraph, or sentence from a book, film, piece of music, or other media.
Though Patrick Nathan’s second novel, The Future Was Color (Counterpoint, 2024), is short, the narrative is immense in scope, capturing the historical jolts and cataclysms of the twentieth century filtered through its protagonist George Curtis’s experience, while—with deep tenderness and sensuality—treating the seemingly-small romances and pleasures of his life as deserving of the same world-historical scale. Each finely wrought unit of prose generates this balance, evoking sentence by sentence that George’s moments of happiness, occurring despite the world’s repeated attempts to stamp him out, are worthy of documentation.
George is a gay, Jewish, Hungarian sci-fi screenwriter living in 1950s Los Angeles. Working in a profit-obsessed industry in the midst of McCarthyism, he must curtail the public (and even private) expression of his sexual desires and intellectual principles. Yet, news of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a short-lived and brutally repressed revolt against the country’s Soviet-aligned government, sparks the desire to write an essay that puts forth a radical cultural critique. His friend, former movie star Madeline Morrison, offers him a “residency” in her luxurious Palm Beach home, which does allow him time to write, but also draws him into her orbit of ostentatious wealth, parties, and sexual abandon.
His coworker, Jack Turner—a handsome, archetypal all-American male who George desires—also becomes a frequent presence at Madeline’s house after a seemingly coincidental run-in, and with Madeline’s facilitation, George and Jack fall into a sexual relationship. Nathan adorns the novel with sensuous descriptions of the sex they have. After two consecutive late-night encounters—where, in bottoming for Jack, George experiences “a unique, unparalleled pleasure that relatively few men on earth gave themselves a chance to experience,” and later performs oral sex in which he “felt Jack’s heartbeat against his lips”—the narrator directly addresses the reader to make a case for these scenes’ inclusion, with one of the novel’s most linguistically and emotionally resonant paragraphs:
If these are intimate details that bulge or drip from the fabric of the story I’ve chosen to tell you, I hope—as I’m sure George would have hoped—that you consider them not as queasy excesses or dilated indulgences but as acts of precision. 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. We are happy with facts, and if it was a fact that Jack’s motor neurons and muscle fibers were beginning to communicate in a pattern of chemically accelerating contractions, and the bulbocavernosus at the root of him began to tremble as the period between these contractions rapidly deteriorated, and the pearlescent, plasmic cocktail of fructose, citrate, amino acids, flavins, phosphorylcholine, dihydrotestosterone, zinc, and vitamin C—shaken as it traveled from gland to gonad to tip to tongue—shot out of his body with the familiar farewell of an oxytocic stupor, and if George, with the sophisticated discretion of his thousands of gustatory papillae, could relish this sweet-bitter, salt-tart gift, I would prefer it not forgotten. 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 novel’s narrator reports on George’s story in the third person, but he is also a character of his own with a personal relationship to George. In this paragraph, Nathan uses the flexibility of this narration to speak directly to the reader, arresting the narrative’s forward momentum with an argument-cum-elegy in support of sex on the page. Within this single paragraph, Nathan encapsulates an idea central to his novel: that joyful expressions of queer sexuality, historically subject to enforced secrecy and erasure, should instead be celebrated and commemorated.
The paragraph’s first sentence assumes a reader that may be averse to clear depictions of sex. One could think of sex scenes as lascivious, distasteful, or simply extraneous. “Queasy excesses” or “dilated indulgences,” in Nathan’s words. Nathan’s narrator instead invites the reader to view the sex scenes they have just read differently: not as episodes of self-serving hedonism, but as “acts of precision.” The descriptions of sex in George’s story, then, are vital to its integrity, and to include them is to respect the story’s full shape.
The narrator then takes a reflective turn: “In grief, one is handed the opportunity, wanted or not, to meditate on happiness, on where joy falls in time.” The “grief” the narrator invokes is not specified, but it is suggested. With George spoken of in the past tense, and the narrator implied to be a friend of his, it is clear that George is no longer alive in the narrator’s time. The grief, then, travels through both characters. If George grieves for his past and the narrator grieves for George, then the grief also leads both to the memory of the intimate, embodied joy George shared with Jack, experienced firsthand by George, and passed down as a memorial and a gift to his friend.
The narrator enjoins the reader that “to pretend,” as people do in large and small ways every day, “is not a path to happiness.” To “pretend” would be to excise the bone-deep happiness George experienced in having sex with Jack, a happiness so powerful that its memory is summoned in times of grief. To “pretend” is to court misery, and conversely, says Nathan’s narrator, “we are happy with facts.” The facts of the oral sex George performed on Jack are then laid out in factual and thorough detail.
Later in the novel, the narrator notes how, in his childhood, George’s parents “imposed specificity,” teaching him to learn the precise names of what constituted the world—butterflies, flowers, trees, emotions. The implicit lesson is that to know the proper name of each thing is to understand and respect the whole of one’s world. In describing Jack’s orgasm and George’s tasting of his semen, Nathan, through his narrator, applies the same lesson. The chemical and physical processes of orgasm are described with accuracy and care, and in precise order. He tells the reader of the “communication” between the nervous and muscular systems, which sparks “contractions” that cause the expulsion of semen, the chemical components of which are dutifully enumerated. Nathan defamiliarizes the experience of orgasm through the description’s granularity, guiding the reader to consider in full an embodied experience that is typically unaccompanied by detailed language or conscious thought.
Exact as it is, Nathan’s language is far from clinical. He describes the orgasm in a single sentence, accumulating clauses that unfurl with rhythmic momentum. The sentence is adorned with evocative verbs—“tremble,” “shaken,” “shot,”—and laden with consonances and assonances—“pearlescent, plasmic cocktail,” “gland to gonad to tip to tongue,” “familiar farewell.” The sentence is as musical as it is factual, luxuriant as it is literal. Fittingly, it reaches its apotheosis with Jack’s climax. Switching seamlessly from describing Jack’s orgasm to George’s acceptance of it, Nathan writes that “George, with the sophisticated discretion of his thousands of gustatory papillae, could relish this sweet-bitter, salt-tart gift,” a sensorially rich marrying of the empirical and the intimate. The physical process of taste is a fact, but so is that George “relishes” tasting Jack, that he experiences this taste as a gift. There is no arbitrary demarcation between “objective” and “subjective” reality; George’s pleasure in receiving Jack’s semen is a fact on equal footing with the semen’s chemical composition.
Nathan caps this virtuosic sentence with an elegant understatement from his narrator: “I would prefer it not forgotten.” He has already made the case for the importance of George and Jack’s sex: The sentence, written as it is it with such exactitude and ecstasy, makes its own case for commemoration. Yet, the paragraph’s conclusion reiterates that too often, “a happiness like theirs…dies with a man like George.” In the novel’s second section—set in the years between George’s arrival in New York City in 1944 as an adolescent immigrant named György, and his move to Los Angeles—George both discovers his sexuality and its ramifications. He cruises in underground bathrooms, risking assault, entrapment, and even deportation; an arrest ultimately leads him to leave New York to avoid jail time. The same risks arise in Los Angeles, and are equally acute given the pervasive homophobia of the 1950s and the political culture of informing. Through George’s experiences, Nathan illustrates how legal and social repression forced queer sexuality into secrecy. In the time and place George lived in, gay sex and intimacy had to be hidden and protected to maintain basic safety, leaving the experiences—and the joys—of men like George absent from the dominant historical record.
The paragraph’s final cause alludes to the AIDS crisis: “…a lot of men like George did die, long before their time.” This is another reminder of the large-scale erasure of the experiences of queer people, invoking the pandemic which killed scores of gay men in the 1980s and 1990s, and thereby wiped many of their perspectives from history. In the novel’s last pages, the narrator reveals that George himself died from AIDS-related illness in Paris, and that he listened to George tell his story as he cared for him. This late event in the novel reframes the cited paragraph as an act of recuperation: in the novel’s fictional context, George is a man whose story would otherwise go forgotten, had not the narrator listened and recounted his story with detail and generosity.
Happiness, however temporary and intermittent, is emphasized as vitally important in the cited paragraph and throughout the novel, a rarity in a world steeped in destruction. Joy takes on greater meaning when one survives, as George does, the Holocaust, McCarthyism, the Cold War, entrapment, assault, and substance abuse, and loses one’s life to AIDS. When this fulfillment is found in an intimate experience that has been systematically erased, punished, and pushed to the margins of society, it is all the more important to honor this intimacy in defiance of efforts to snuff it out. In having his narrator describe the joy of George and Jack’s sex through principled argument, lush linguistic flourishes, and sober elegy in the space of a single paragraph, Nathan stakes a claim for the seismic importance of queer sexuality against ideological erasure. To mark the past joys of a man like George is not only to correct a deliberately incomplete record, but to chart a course for the future—to assert that, even for those whose simple existence places them in the crosshairs of a violent world and a censorious culture, joy has been and will be possible.
