Nathan—whose previous books include the passionate and perceptive Image Control , which links recurring strains of fascism to our contemporary and quotidian consumption of images—tethers George’s interest in the movies to their potential for social and political subversion. We learn, in the book’s first section, that George wants to write something real; that he’d finally felt, once again, as if his life was worth something. And before the story advances, as George and an ensemble cast gallivant from the beaches of Malibu toward a carefully timed and seismic climax in Las Vegas, the narrative moves backward, relating the back stories and back alleys and breathless beginnings that make such a life. Nathan’s choice to narrate events “out of order,” to move between geographies and artistic genealogies, is not coincidental or arbitrary but a testament to the material and psychic effects of war, colonization, and displacement across generations. It is no wonder that the painterly language of abstraction, as Paul Virilio once told Sylvère Lotringer, is indebted to the cataclysmic effects of the First World War, or that, for Gertrude Stein (see her 1926 address “Composition as Explanation” for but one example) as for other progressive artists and intellectuals of the interwar period, the preparations of war and fascism were seen as necessary ingredients for the inauguration of an American modernism.
One cannot behold a work of art without gazing upon the violence that may also be obscured by it. Perhaps this is also Nathan’s disquieting assessment, by linking an undercurrent of queer art in New York City with popcorn Hollywood production through the figure of George and his aspiration for cinema to reorganize the coordinates of the possible. Like Jacques Rancière, who has long understood that art cannot be reducible to its medium—the idea of any given art, for instance, far predating its technical means—Nathan’s novel shows us how, in George’s alternative vision for cinema and his promiscuous version of a heretofore hidden postwar culture, the “work” of art is to in fact destabilize the aesthetic regime that it depends upon for its very identity. (Even as a child in Budapest does George understand the relationship between the “pastimes” of science and art that link aestheticization with murder: the containment and cataloging and labeling of animals in the zoological gardens beyond his home, a landscape in which readers can’t help but glimpse the nascent drafting of Germany’s “Final Solution” that would soon follow.) George, as irremediably other, as orphan and immigrant, as “the man with the camera” but also the scriptwriter that provides the camera with its series of instructions, is what I’ve elsewhere referred to as a “third figure”—both storyteller and translator: the foreigner who tells the story of how they arrived (in Budapest, in New York City, in Los Angeles, in Paris…) and thus passes it on for distinct audiences. George, in Nathan’s polygonal novel, is both a bridge between cultures and a channel to the future that he has implicitly understood—even divined—and which he will never see.
Back in the past, in New York City, where he arrives, unbeknownst to him, as a stray, he’ll meet a group of artists and intellectuals called the Three Forty-Seven, named after the address they share; on 6th Avenue and West 8th Street, affectionately dubbed “The New York School,” he’ll encounter both his aesthetic education and his sexual awakening, arriving at the Waldorf Cafeteria wearing his most tattered shirt, “to simulate an age, a shabbiness, to match those around him.” Nathan is quick to point out that George, though not an actor by trade, is not beyond his own imitation game. Performance serves as a leitmotif for the novel, whether the specific act of passing in environments where it is not safe to be who one is, or the routine posturing, well before the intensification and stratification of social media, of the persona familiar to the public and estranged to one’s self. The narrator of our present, who has endured not just the avatars of AI influencers but also the environmental precarity of normalized wildfire, forever chemicals, and airborne particulates, knows this well.
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. … 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 coterie of New York City artists whom George will befriend—playwrights, painters, poets—think of themselves as counterpoints to La-La Land, immune and opposed to, as one character remarks, “that California brainlessness.” George, as a double outsider—queer, immigrant—negotiates East Coast erudite pretensions and, later, West Coast celebrity elitism, through a sincerity and idealism that will not—despite cultural and personal tragedies along the way—be extinguished. The Hungarian Revolution would become, in the papers, “an insurrection”: stamped out and cast away into cultural oblivion, as the public moved onto other, more fashionable, things (the Suez Crisis). Paul, George’s first love, would disappear from New York City, becoming, when he resurfaced years later, first a walking zombie, then an unseen corpse: a failed medical experiment in so-called conversion therapy. George’s own parents would never end up joining him in New York City after all; they die, like innumerable others before history, beyond the page, beyond the scope of documentation. Though the reinscribing of historical record through the collaborative call and response of oral testimony, is, above all, Nathan’s mission. Taking a cue, perhaps, from German philosopher Walter Benjamin and his aim, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”—the text, not coincidentally, that got Benjamin, while already in exile, denationalized— that “historical construction” be “devoted to the memory of the nameless,” Nathan orients his prose with compassion, sensitivity, and emotional intelligence, avoiding sentimentalism to honor the idiosyncrasies and imperfections and manifold sensibilities of his characters. In one of the earliest moments of textual encounter with the novel’s unnamed narrator, toward the very end of the book’s first section, Nathan writes, transparently and unapologetically, of such ambitions: