When Doom Was All the Rage
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THE FUTURE WAS COLOR: A Novel
by Patrick Nathan
Counterpoint. 210 pages, $26.

GYORGY KERTESZ, the central character in this ambitious historical novel, The Future Was Color, fears the world will end before his life does. And with good reason: Gyorgy is Jewish. In 1944, at sixteen, he is sent by his parents from Budapest to New York City to escape the Holocaust, in which his parents will perish. Gyorgy is also gay. He falls in love with a troubled gay man who, believing he and Gyorgy can have no future together, introduces Gyorgy to anonymous sex in public toilets. When Gyorgy is entrapped and arrested, he flees New York and changes his name to avoid deportation.

            Patrick Nathan is the author of Some Hell, a 2019 Lambda Award finalist for gay fiction, Image Control, a nonfiction book on visual media and the rise of fascism, and many essays. Not surprisingly, his latest book is a novel of ideas—

Daniel A. Burr, a frequent G&LR contributor, lives in Covington, KY.