How do you feel different characters experience exile, both at home and abroad? How do invisible prisons differ from real ones? In Mercury Pictures Presents . . . the story moves between the real war and the better version Hollywood is busy creating. Sometimes tragic, often hilarious’ KAREN JOY FOWLER, Observer, Books of the Year Mercury Pictures Presents is a work of historical fiction set in the Italy of rising fascism between the wars. Then the action shifts to California in the late 1930s, more specifically Hollywood and the titular studio which is to become home to many in the flight from Hitler and Mussolini. While we are inside the sometimes manic everyday studio operations led by Artie Feldman, we are even closer to Maria Lagana who has traveled from a village in Italy to Hollywood with hopes, sorrows, delayed dreams, and lots of intelligence. People like you and me, Art? The sons of furriers and cobblers and glovers who’ve been in the business since the battles with the Edison Trust? We came out here to build ourselves a broken kingdom where only the broken prosper, and then, our children, they hold it against us when we make them whole.” Artie may appear cynical and sleazy, but he maintains carefully hidden morals that keep him up at night. His studio becomes a haven for those driven from their homelands. (“You could map the march of fascism across Europe based on Mercury’s employment rolls.”) One of those, eventually, is Nino Picone, now known as Vincent Cortese.

Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra | Waterstones

In response to pro-interventionist messages in recent movies, a group of isolationist senators accused Hollywood of plotting with Roosevelt “to make America punch drunk with propaganda to push her into war” against Germany and Italy. Congressional hearings were hastily arranged to investigate these charges and propose legislative remedies. And Artie Feldman, ever reliant on the free publicity of controversy to find an audience, wanted to both undermine the legitimacy of the investigation and capitalize on his newfound notoriety with Mercury’s next movie. Artie wasn’t known for his joie de vivre, but he usually didn’t fantasize about ending it all this close to lunch. Maria wondered if the Senate Investigation into Motion Picture War Propaganda was giving him agita, but no—the crisis at hand was on his head. His bald spot had finally grown too large for his toupee to conceal. Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. Set in 1940s Hollywood, soon peopled with refugees from fascist Europe, it is the story of Maria whose socialist father was sentenced to internal exile in Mussolini’s Italy. She and her mother immigrated to America, and now she is associate producer at Mercury Pictures, underpaid and uncredited. Her boss Mercury studio founder Artie Feldman names his toupees and is mired in a never-ending battle over studio control with his twin brother. Maria loves a Chinese American, but miscegenation laws force them to keep their relationship under wraps. Her father, in exile, had saved the life of a young man, Nino, whose mother takes him in. He helps the boy with an education. Nino escapes Italy using a false identity, and years later he seeks out Maria to tell her what had happened to her father.

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Mercury Pictures Presents has all the breadth and power of an epic and the attention to detail of an intimate conversation. I read it in a state of admiration for the beauty Marra has wrung from the English language.” —Sara Nović

Mercury Pictures Presents - Sharon Virts | Author Mercury Pictures Presents - Sharon Virts | Author

Whomever. The point is, that Sistine Chapel is something, isn’t it? You want to know what I think?” She didn’t, but Artie’s opinions moved with the tottery insistence of a drunk barging past the maître d’. “I think this Michael Angelo character must’ve been the Preston Sturges of his time.” We learn of her relationship with Chinese American actor Eddie Lu, friendship with an Italian immigrant with ties to her father, and a German emigree hired by the studio. Artie must travel to Washington DC to be questioned by the Senate Investigation into Motion Picture War Propaganda. Themes include the abuses of authoritarianism, the biases introduced through propaganda (and how readily it is believed), and how innocent people are harmed in the process. It is about human connections, figuring out one’s path in the face of systemic discrimination, and the power of forgiveness.

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I haven’t prepared an opening statement,” he admitted. All at once, he felt very much like the man he spent a great deal of psychological effort convincing himself he was not: a middle-aged narcissist whose bald spot had outpaced his toupees, a guy about to have his loyalties questioned and character maligned on the largest stage in America, an ex-boxer who could defend himself in a dark alley but not in a well-lit hearing room on Capitol Hill. How does the novel treat its bit players? What do you think Marra was trying to say about whose stories matter? Is there a minor character that really appealed to you? Maria smiled. “In that case, you’re a regular Einstein, Art.” “Hey, you laugh, but you of all people should know being underestimated is a competitive advantage. When these Mayflower Society Wall Street suits see me, they’ll think they can use my fedora as a bedpan. It goes against everything they’ve been taught to take a loudmouth immigrant in a bad rug seriously.”

Mercury Pictures Presents: A Novel: Marra, Anthony Mercury Pictures Presents: A Novel: Marra, Anthony

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. The story develops slowly and there isn't a lot of plot but the author's wonderful descriptions bring this world to life. His characters are treated lovingly, they are flawed but caring – the villains are off-stage – and, despite conflicting emotions, try to help one another. Not everyone has a happy conclusion but alongside the sadness you are left with a connection to and understanding of these people. So, what of that antic voice that seems so non-Marra? Particularly early on, the narration is rife with extended, sardonic descriptions, no more so that when we’re spending time with Maria’s great aunts, who serve as a kind of comic chorus. Characters banter in sharpened one-liners, which is perhaps fitting in the Hollywood studio, but it’s there among the Old-World Italians, too. At times, it feels like we’ve stumbled into an Aaron Sorkin script.

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Just to ease the dramatic tension, though, I’ll state up front that, in the end, Marra melted my heart, and I view Mercury as a worthy addition to the author’s canon. A novel so rich and wondrous . . . that there’s only one word for Anthony Marra: genius.” —Sally Mann I loved the first half of the book and thought it worthy of 5 stars. My enthusiasm waned as the book got lengthier and more involved. The book ended on a stronger note with its epilogue. The epilogue provided a satisfying closure to the novel; I enjoyed how it tied up loose threads about the more major characters and explained where they were in their lives. And Maria had evolved by then to have more warmth and charm. Like Philip Roth’s classic The Plot Against America, Anthony Marra’s Mercury Pictures Presents is an explicitly political novel that reminds us of the fault lines running through American society and correcting images of America’s mythic and heroic past. Perhaps heroic for some, but not for America’s immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities. Mercury Pictures Presents will stand as a classic novel of the run-up and early years of World War Two in America.

Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra | Goodreads Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra | Goodreads

I have been carefully avoiding the recent rash of WWII novels but I couldn't resist Anthony Marra and was very glad I hadn't. Hence, her life becomes her work at Mercury, a place run by Artie and his identical twin, Ned, two men who’ve never been mistaken for one another and hate each other’s guts: For years, Maria had devised strategies for smuggling the profane beneath the most sensitive censorial snouts. At her best, she passed more colorful bullshit than Babe the Blue Ox. Nino’s mother taught him how to light a photograph according to its purpose, its audience, and its subject. ‘We will make him fall in love,’ she assured an anxious young seamstress who came to have her portrait taken for a prospective suitor. The suitor, a stonemason in Ohio whom the seamstress would be buried next to seventy-three years later, saw the love of his life for the first time through the eyes of Nino’s mother.”All told, there are about twenty characters in the novel, each one connected in some way. An interesting figure is Anna Weber, who has emigrated from Berlin, Germany and is the studio's miniaturist. Anna purposely left Germany before the war started, due to its politics. Besides, my father was a defense attorney in the early days of Mussolini’s regime. I’m not unfamiliar with show trials.” She was Rubenesque, and, like both painter and deli sandwich, irrefutable proof of Creation’s genius. So much old-time snappy wit that Mercury Pictures Presents should come with popcorn and a 78-ounce Coke.” —Ron Charles, TheWashington Post