"Mercury Pictures Presents opens on the studio lot of the eponymous Mercury Pictures International. It’s 1941 and these first scenes play out as wry screwball comedy—the dialogue cracks and sparkles. This buoyancy persists throughout Anthony Marra’s latest novel, and it’s a feat the way Marra extends this delicate and clever (yet deeply empathetic) touch throughout a narrative that spans the globe. From fascism's grip on Europe to America's wartime propaganda machine, we travel up and down family trees and across the interconnected lives of Hollywood filmmakers (many of them unsung and uncredited, many of them immigrants). Page by page, Mercury Pictures Presents shifts effortlessly from domestic melodrama, to spy thriller, to documentary exposé, to classical comedy of manners. The terror of wartime, the regret of youthful mistakes, the clash of ideologies, the push and pull of familial ties across time and oceans—it's all here, woven with care, indelible. And yet Marra also reminds us of the humbling truth that even the bigwigs, headline-makers, and brightest stars of yesteryear eventually fade with time."
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780451495204
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, New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
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 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.
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.”
