Patrick Nathan

Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist

Image Control

A wrenching and layered debut novel about a gay teen's coming-of-age in the aftermath of his father's suicide.

A Novel

Some Hell

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 It is a novel as well as a historical document, upending our perceptions of just how personal the political can be.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.

The Future Was Color

Susan Sontag meets Hanif Abdurraqib in this fascinating exploration of the unexpected connections between how we consume images and the insidious nature of Fascism. Images come at us quickly, often without context. A photograph of Syrian children suffering in the wake of a chemical attack segues into a stranger’s pristine Instagram selfie. Before we can react to either, a new meme induces a laugh and a share. While such constant give and take might seem innocent, even entertaining, this barrage of content numbs our ability to examine critically how the world, broken down into images, affects us. Images without context isolate us, turning everything we experience into mere transactions. It is exactly this alienation that leaves us vulnerable to fascism—a reactionary politics that is destroying not only our lives and our nations, but also the planet’s very ability to sustain human civilization. Who gets to control the media we consume? Can we intervene, or at least mitigate the influence of constant content? Mixing personal anecdotes with historical and political criticism, Image Control explores art, social media, photography, and other visual mediums to understand how our culture and our actions are manipulated, all the while building toward the idea that if fascism emerges as aesthetics, then so too can anti-fascism. Learning how to ethically engage with the world around us is the first line of defense we have against the forces threatening to tear that world apart.

Patrick Nathan

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