McCarthyism, Malibu and B-movies: ‘The Future Was Color’ isn’t your average beach read

Patrick Nathan’s “The Future Was Color” is not your typical breezy summer beach read.

Yet lovers of literary fiction will still want to take summer’s long, hot days to luxuriate in the novel’s prose and its steamy eroticism, not to mention its thoughtful and challenging contemplations on art, politics and, well, the entire human condition.

When this moody, noir-ish story opens, readers meet George, a Hungarian immigrant who has managed to find middling success writing monster movies as a hack screenwriter.