Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra

Published by Hogarth on August 2, 2022

Mercury Pictures Presents is a sprawling but tightly controlled novel. Set before and during the Second World War, most key characters are Italian immigrants, although one is an American-born citizen of Chinese ancestry. While the novel is centered around a minor movie studio owned by two estranged brothers, its grand theme is America’s dependence upon and distrust of immigrants. That theme is captured in this description of an immigrant character: “There was nothing he wasn’t willing to fail at. Besides denying his racism, it was his most American quality.”

The brothers who co-founded Mercury Pictures are Artie and Ned Feldman. They had success making silent movies, but larger studios surpassed them with talkies. Ned works in New York handling the financial side of the business. Artie is in Los Angeles, overseeing the operation of the studio. Maria Lagana is Artie’s head of production, having worked her way up from typist.

Maria’s mother fled Italy with Maria when Mussolini exiled Maria's father, a prominent lawyer, to an internment colony in the Italian hinterlands. While in exile, Maria’s father saved young Nino Picone from drowning. He arranges for Nino’s informal adoption by the Cortese family. Nino works as a photographer, often taking passport photos that will be used in forged passports. He plans to travel to America with Maria’s father, who has acquired a forged passport of his own. That plan falls apart but, thanks to an act of sacrifice, Nino comes to America using the passport of Vincent Cortese.

The novel opens with Maria trying to get a proposed Mercury Pictures film approved by the Production Code Administration, a censor that, like the Senate, regards Hollywood as anti-American. Maria is the brains behind some of Mercury’s best films but she can’t get a producer credit, much less an executive position and decent salary, because of her gender. Maria lives with Eddie Lu, an American actor of Chinese ancestry who can’t get a decent role until after Pearl Harbor, when he becomes typecast playing Japanese villains.

Nino has been in the US for three years before he finds the courage to track down Maria in California. Maria blames Nino for abandoning her father but, for reasons she doesn’t quite understand, gives him a job as a photographer at Mercury. Nino works under his assumed identity but is always at risk of being exposed and perhaps branded as an Italian spy.

Foreign spies are on everyone’s mind. One of Mercury’s propaganda films claims that 25,000 Japanese residents of Los Angeles were sabotaging America, justifying the nation’s horrific internment of Japanese Americans because of their ancestry. The hatred that fuels wars causes Mercury to lose German and Italian employees because wartime laws prevent them from working with cameras or chemicals. Maria must carry an enemy alien registration card and will be arrested if she travels outside a small zone in LA.

The plot is a collection of memorable scenes and vignettes. Eddie Lu is a friend of Bela Lugosi, who resents being typecast after Dracula but regrets turning down Frankenstein after Boris Karloff became Hollywood’s go-to monster. Eddie understands what it means to be typecast. He cherishes Ibsen and Shakespeare but will never perform in film as anything other than a Japanese villain. “Studios strove to make ethnic characters more relatable to white America by casting them with actors who supposedly brought them one step closer to Anglo-Saxon: Chinese actors played Japanese characters, Jewish actors played Chinese characters, Catholic actors played Jewish characters, and Protestant actors played Catholic characters.”

In another scene that emphasizes America’s history of racism, the Army recruits a failed architect who works on set design for Mercury to build replicas of Berlin in Utah that can be destroyed in propaganda films. She supervises prison laborers who construct the buildings, including a young black man who insisted on being served at a lunch counter, setting events in motion that ended with the death of a German POW. The innocent teen is serving a life sentence despite playing no part in the German’s death. The architect was born in Germany and, while she is worried that the Army might hold her ancestry against her, she does not face the same kind of bigotry as the black teen.

While the novel tracks the lives of many characters, the story is primarily Maria’s, including the extended family she makes for herself. She is a victim of fascism in Italy and of nationalism in America, losing a father in Italy and a lover in the US while enduring a loss of liberty simply because she fled a country that went to war with America. Her moving story hits home when, in an epilogue, she returns to Italy to learn what she can about her father’s fate.

Mercury Pictures Presents offers a perfect blend of humor and drama. People are awful until a good one comes alone, making simple decency seem remarkable. Social commentary is poignant without becoming overbearing. The story evokes emotion without becoming saccharine. The plot takes the reader on entertaining detours without becoming lost. Dialog is intelligent and surprising. Historical research (cited in the acknowledgements) contributes to a detailed atmosphere, both in Hollywood and Italy. This is an award-worthy novel. I admired everything about it.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Lion's Den by Anthony Marra

Published digitally by Amazon on December 19, 2019

Amazon commissioned five stories for a series it calls Inheritance. The stories are unconnected to each other except by the broad theme of family secrets. In a departure from its usual format, Tzer Island will review one story in the Inheritance series each day this week.

“The Lion’s Den” is an exceptional story about the evolving relationship between a father and son, told from the son’s perspective as he recalls his father’s death. Michael’s only accomplishment in life has been to write a vengeful tell-all memoir of his father, commissioned by a rightwing publisher that resented the rehabilitation of his father’s reputation in the public eye. Michael’s father, a combination of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, leaked documents revealing the extent of government surveillance of American citizens. For that he was vilified as a traitor and then heralded as a hero (often by the same columnists) after the Bush administration fell into disfavor. After six years in prison, he was pardoned by Obama.

Michael’s family suffered financial ruin after his father’s arrest. Michael resented his father’s refusal to profit from his actions by selling the rights to his story to Oliver Stone. “Moral heroism in America usually has the longevity of celebrity marriage,” Michael explains, “yet my father’s caught fire and kept burning, in no small part because he refused to speak of it at all, declining every opportunity to explain himself.” Hence Michael’s decision to profit from his father’s life and help his family by writing the memoir.

The story’s focus is the day Michael takes his father to see the lions at the zoo and the following day, when Michael serves as an emergency replacement speaker at the ethics symposium hosted by the Catholic grammar school he attended. He is replacing a securities trader who has been arrested for fraud and less savory crimes, making the trader a poor choice to speak about ethics, although the school had always been more concerned with a speaker’s name recognition than good character. Unfortunately, it “couldn’t afford the speaking fees of those uncorrupted by power.”

Low-key humor permeates the story. The ethics symposium is one example. Here’s another: “My mother, the most devout Catholic among us, didn’t believe in divorce, which was problematic in that her husband didn’t seem to believe in marriage.” And the thought that “parents love empty gestures,” in this case a school honor code, because “It’s about feeling that your children are decent, honest, and virtuous, rather than doing the work to make it true.”

Anthony Marra packs a surprising amount of characterization into this relatively short story, including Michael’s observation that he and his father conduct their emotional lives through newspaper clippings and “torn-out articles. Our conversations followed similar patterns of recycled factoids.” Despite their difficulties, there is something touching about the relationship, about the father’s jovial lack of resentment concerning the memoir, about the mundane truths (the father’s fame, the shadow in which the son lives) that had become life-defining family secrets. Even more touching is the gesture — in this case, not an empty gesture — that Michael makes at the story’s end, creating a fleeting tribute to his father that only Michael will understand.

RECOMMENDED

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

Published by Hogarth on May 7, 2013

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a haunting novel of exquisite prose and striking images, of big themes built upon small, poignant moments. Every character, no matter how minor, rings true. Rarely has a debut novel so impressed me with its power and beauty.

Sonja Rabina is a trauma surgeon who left London and returned to her home in Volchansk in 1996. She is the hospital's last remaining physician when Akhmed shows up in 2004 with eight-year-old Havaa, who was hiding in the woods as Russian soldiers took her Chechen father away and burned her house to the ground. Akhmed, an incompetent doctor from Havaa's village, agrees to stay on at the hospital if Sonja will allow Havaa to remain. The two physicians are a study in contrasts: Sonja is skillful but lacks empathy for her patients (and for Havaa); Akhmed has empathy for all but no skill (except for drawing, which he much prefers to medicine). Neither would willingly trade places with the other.

The story looks back over a ten year period to reveal how the novel's key players arrived at their present circumstances. Anthony Marra creates sympathy for, and assures the reader's understanding of, each character. There are no true villains here, only people who are forced by circumstances to do things they regret. Characters are steeped in their region's misery: Dokka, Havaa's father, whose ten fingers were the price of resistance before he disappeared for the final time; Khassan Geshilov, the historian whose "history of a nation that had destroyed history and nationhood" reached fifteen million words and was forever in need of revision; Khassan's son Ramzan, an informant for the Russians who is feared and reviled by all, but who once (unknown to all) was a tragic hero; Akhmed's bedridden wife, Ula, whose descriptions of her day are mistaken for hallucinations; Sonja's sister Natasha, who twice pays an unconscionable price for her freedom. Although the characters endure atrocities and disappearances and lives of deprivation, they carry on, often guarding secrets, not just from the state, but from those closest to them.

The characters form a microcosm of Chechnya during a harsh and brutal time.  The novel provides a fascinating, condensed look at Chechnya in evolution over a ten year period, as well as the tension between Chechens and the ethnic Russians who were forcibly relocated to Chechnya, but the information is so seamlessly integrated into the story that it never feels like a history lesson.  Some chapters are so intensely moving they're difficult to read, but the trauma of Chechen life is tempered by the reminder that "the nervous system doesn't exist exclusively to feel pain."  Love and tenderness coexist with torture and death.

The maturity and sophistication of Marra's storytelling is astonishing. Among the novel's many symbols, my favorite is ice, symbolic of both survival and disappearance, "a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory." Another is static from the radio, formless sound that can be shaped (like memories, or certain people) into whatever we desire.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena explores diverse themes, all timeless and universal: the cycles of life (babies are born to replace the dead as new wars flare up to kill the living); the importance and difficulty of family; books and art as instruments of bonding and as vaults for the preservation of memories; the nature of betrayal (of family, friends, and lovers) and what it does to the soul; the protective power of hope, kindness, and generosity. Although the novel's time frame is 1994 to 2004, with a particular focus on the last four days of that period, every now and then Marra gives us a peek at what will come later, reminding us of the story's most important theme, one that is echoed in the book's title: people suffer, death is inevitable, but every day, new lives begin and existing lives begin anew. Life goes on.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED