“Here, I have an idea.” In the lower right corner, under the Produced By credit, Artie crossed out the John in John Doe and wrote Jane. “Jane Doe. No one, and I mean no one, will have any doubt who Jane Doe really is. Satisfied?” Maria might have been had she not noticed the one non-anonymized name on the poster. It appeared right above the title, in small but legible cursive: Art Feldman and Mercury Pictures Presents …
I’m going to go with: It’s not the book, it’s me. Mercury Pictures Presents has plenty of five star reviews, and I have raved about author Anthony Marra’s work before, but this time? I was kind of bored; unmoved by the writing and unsurprised by the plot and its details. I have zero interest in stories about Hollywood and moviemaking, and I feel like everything important that can be said about WWII in fiction was written by the people who lived through it, and although there was the potential for something interesting about Hollywood propaganda drumming up fascistic control over those “resident aliens” who had fled rising fascism in their birth countries, it didn’t much pay off for me. Marra draws some fine characters, gives them some snappy lines, puts them in singular circumstances, and none of it really touched me. I acknowledge this failure to connect is on me; another reader’s experience may be totally different. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
“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.”
Mercury Pictures is a small-time movie studio — owned and run by twin Jewish brothers who emigrated from Poland long before Hitler was a threat — and as America enters WWII, they hit it big with military training films and jingoistic agitprop created through their hastily assembled Propaganda Unit. The storyline of Mercury Pictures Presents follows the fortunes of this studio and the (mostly) immigrant artists who staff it. We see the fate of Italian antifascists who were sent into internal exile (confino) by Mussilini, unable to leave a certain radius within San Lorenzo. We then witness the fate of those antifascists who fled Italy or Germany ahead of WWII — forced to register as resident aliens when the US declared war on Europe, unable to travel beyond a two mile radius of their homes, subject to curfews and the confiscation of goods. We see expat German architects engaged to recreate Berlin in the Utah desert for the USAF to test incendiary bombs for use against the actual city (and this part may have been shocking if I hadn’t read about it recently in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia). We see a Chinese-American actor reduced to playing a caricature of a bellicose Japanese bogeyman (and the racism that he provokes in the role is so successful that he finds himself in danger on the streets of L.A.) There’s a goldmine of irony in the idea of Hollywood (and its German- and Italian-born immigrant artists) manufacturing the face of an enemy for the country to set its sights on — even more irony in the eventual McCarthy Hearings trying to root out those Hollywood Communists who had been antifascists “too early” — but while the elements of something interesting were here, I simply didn’t find it terribly engaging. A taste of the snappy writing:
• 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.
• Annunziata knew the bribes were wasted, but when you’re desperate, every open pocket is a wishing well.
• She was Rubenesque, and, like both painter and deli sandwich, irrefutable proof of Creation’s genius.
And there were many grasps at meaning-making:
A dark inkling deepens to certainty. This parched patch of Utah is indeed the farthest outpost of the Third Reich, alike in the immodesty of its vision and narrowness of its humanity.
But I think that, overall, this experience just confirms my disinterest in WWII novels. This was a fresh angle (I didn’t know about the confino before), and Marra has a large and colourful cast of characters intersect in complex ways, but the story didn’t surprise or move me. And I so don’t care about Hollywood that the setting neither charmed or intrigued me. And as mine seems to be a minority opinion, no one should take my word on this one.
