Mercury Pictures Presents

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.