Mercury Pictures Presents: A Novel

by Anthony Marra

Hardcover, 2022

Status

Available

Call number

Mar

Genres

Publication

Hogarth (2022), 432 pages

Description

Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. HTML: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 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… (more)

Original publication date

2022-7-19

Media reviews

New York Times

The line between art and agitprop can be narrow, and rarely more so than in Hollywood, where people sometimes struggle to know (or care) what art is to begin with. This notion hovers behind Anthony Marra’s elegant new novel, “Mercury Pictures Presents,” in which Artie Feldman, the improbably

endearing vulgarian who runs the book’s titular studio — the sort of B-movie factory that flourished in the slipstream of Hollywood’s majors during the Golden Age 1930s and ’40s — keeps his toupee collection displayed in his office and has never met a bad idea he didn’t love....It is impossible to do justice to Marra’s smooth, sweeping style in bits — viewed in isolation, such descriptions could easily seem overwrought and clumsy — but knit together, these pieces have striking command and authority. This is a gorgeous book, but its gorgeousness, too, might be merely a false front for what’s really on its mind.... The success of “Mercury Pictures Presents,” both the novel and the Hollywood entity it depicts, is evanescent and ambiguous, enduring and clear all at once. Whether Artie, the showman, and Maria, the book’s historical anchor and ethical conscience, will survive is one question, but the ideas posed by Marra’s novel assuredly do, and they resonate all the more strongly through our own contemporary, distressingly fascist-adjacent, moment.

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Washington Post

Marra has published his second novel, a story set before and during World War II called “Mercury Pictures Presents.” The author’s fans, who include former president Barack Obama, will recognize his elegant resolution of tangled disasters, his heartbreaking poignancy, his eye for historical

curiosities that exceed the parameters of fiction. But the emotional range here is narrower, the record of human cruelty more subtle. And if “Mercury Pictures Presents” doesn’t generate the impact of “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,” well, that’s an impossibly high standard.... Marra demonstrates his remarkable ability to capture the intricate cruelties of political and social collapse. Borrowing the tropes of spy thrillers and police procedurals, he transcribes a web of chaos and kindness that carries a few lucky souls through the fires of Italy’s collapse. Along the way, he sets down the lines of future coincidences so outlandish that only history could validate them.... The novel’s most fascinating move is the way it teases out the complications of realism — particularly in the service of propaganda. Marra describes studio filmmakers struggling to shoot footage of actual battle scenes that looks convincing. Despite their best efforts, the technological limits of the cameras make the documentary reels appear tiny and confusing. The only solution, ultimately, is to fake the carnage with reenactments. “Everywhere,” Marra deadpans, “there was a pent-up hunger for what resembled reality.” ...What’s real is rendered fake; what’s fake is passed off as real. Who can maintain a sense of moral clarity in such a national house of mirrors? ...you can trust that the novel will eventually resolve into focus with a moment of radical compassion that emits no more noise than a sigh.

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Booklist

Marra’s prose is fluid and sprightly; each sentence is imbued with wit and heart and dances to its own internal rhythm. The dialogue is crisp and filled with ripostes and underline-worthy bon mots. The characters are simultaneously larger than life and all too human, utterly memorable. The

historically iconic settings are brought sensuously to life by Marra’s cinematic eye. Marra has ascended to the top of the literary ranks.

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Kirkus Reviews

Like the author’s earlier novels, the award-winning A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013) and The Tsar of Love and Techno (2015), this one builds a discrete world and shows how its denizens are shaped—often warped—by circumstance. But the Hollywood setting feels overfamiliar and the

characters curiously uninvolving. While the prose frequently sings, there are also ripely overwritten passages: At a party, the “thunking heels of lindy-hopping couples dimpled the boozy air”; fireworks are described as a “molten asterisk in the heavens to which the body on the ground is a footnote.” The World War II Hollywood setting is colorful, but it’s just a B picture.

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Publisher's Weekly

Marra’s meticulously crafted latest (after the collection The Tsar of Love and Techno) follows a host of outsiders as they try to make it through pre-WWII Italy and wartime Los Angeles with some of their morals intact.... While Marra’s pleasure in the details and argot of the past occasionally

feels like overkill, this tough-minded, funny outing exemplifies what Maria calls the democratic promise of “the miniaturist’s gaze,” in which “all were worthy.” Thanks to Marra, the pleasure is contagious.

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