Mercury Pictures Presents
Ratings8
Average rating3.6
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini’s Italy to 1940s Los Angeles—a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice from the award-winning author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena “A genuinely moving and life-affirming novel that’s a true joy to read.”—Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere “A gorgeous book . . . sublime.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Guardian, Booklist Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father’s arrest. Fifteen years later, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won’t speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can’t escape the studio’s narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria’s only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father’s past threatens Maria’s carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father’s fate—and her own. Written with intelligence, wit, and an exhilarating sense of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents spans many moods and tones, from the heartbreaking to the ecstatic. It is a love letter to life’s bit players, a panorama of an era that casts a long shadow over our own, and a tour de force by a novelist whose work The Washington Post calls “a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles.”
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I was super excited about this one. The synopsis drew me in, the cover is gorgeous, the setting is fantastic, the premise is promising... but I found myself utterly bored and impatient to finish.
The book mainly follows Maria's story, an Italian immigrant who moved to America with her mother. At the start of World War II, she is working for Mercury Pictures. This was a turbulent time for Hollywood for a lot of immigrants given the stigma against people coming from countries aligned with the Axis powers. As the war carries on, Maria and the others have to navigate the changes that come with wartime as well as figures from Maria's past.
I loved the concept of all of this, but it fell flat for me. There were too many characters. I couldn't name half of them from memory if I tried. The plot was chaotic, or I should say plots. This felt like two different books. There were some funny lines, so I'll compliment the witty writing (actually, it was well-written altogether). Still, I'm not really sure what the full picture of the book was. There were too many jumps and not enough character development.
Marra is just a beautiful storyteller from the sentence level right up to the macro plotting effort involved in satisfyingly closing out nearly a dozen different character arcs, often with beautiful, melancholic effect. There's the toupee'd b-movie mogul Artie Feldman and his girl Friday Maria Lagana. Maria has left her father Giuseppe behind in exile in San Lorenzo Italy, now recreated on a Hollywood soundstage. There's a German miniaturist Anna Weber who finds herself in Utah recreating German tenements. Shakespearean actor Eddie Lu who dreams of something more than simply playing Asian caricatures. Passport photographers, widowed great-aunts awaiting death, and a mother with a suitcase filled with the dirt of her homeland. Woven throughout so many of these stories is the constant tension between reality and artifice during the lead up to the Second World War. Even more compelling and bizarre is that much of the book is drawn from actual events. German Village existed just an hour outside of Salt Lake City and the roofs of Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica were covered to look like a sleepy suburban enclave complete with actors high above pretending to mow their lawns and hang laundry to fool potential bombers.
And can Marra turn a phrase, here the prose is often inflected with the sharp pulpy dialogue of Philip Kerr's WWII Bernie Gunther thrillers and the pop of early Hollywood hustle. But threading throughout is the shimmering lyricism I've come to expect from Marra. Fascism, racism, paranoia and propaganda are all explored and it's less a mirror of our own time and more a reinforcement that sadly this is as it's always been.
