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Anthony Marra’s Mercury Pictures Presents [2022]
I first became acquainted with Anthony Marra reading his book The Tsar of Techno and Love. It was an impressive piece of writing, a collection of cleverly interlinked short stories, by turns, mordant, thoughtful, compassionate, and historically rooted. This November I read his Mercury Pictures. The previous two months I reviewed two important but heart-rending books. I appreciated them but I plunged into Mercury Pictures with the hope I’d read something lighter, humorous, and infused with a compelling narrative.
Marra’s book has all this. Its central axis is Hollywood in the 30s and the 40s, Hollywood and its bizarre culture. It’s very funny, lots of shtick, great dialog, satiric. At times it reads like a movie treatment. How many writers, serious writers, have been lured into Hollywood in search of fame and wealth? F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Dalton Trumbo, Earnest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Nathaniel West, B. Traven, Bertolt Brecht, Clancy Sigal, Norman Mailer, Bud Schulberg, Joan Didion, Alice Walker, and Michael Chabon. In general that encounter was not fruitful; at times, it was disastrous and soul-sucking. Only B. Traven avoided that fate by having John Huston come down to Mexico to film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Luis Buñuel resisted Hollywood’s gravitational pull.
A quarter way through Marra’s sprawling novel I began to think of the siren call of Hollywood. It was evident in Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue and David Mitchell. Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was brilliant, his Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet was good but by The Bone Clocks arrived it was clear that Mitchell was aiming towards Hollywood or at least a lucrative interactive video game. Many writers have surrendered their solitary craft in search of wealth and celebrity. I feared Marra was going down the same road.
But I was wrong. Despite the shtick - which does get thick - there are things far deeper at play in Marra’s novel. First there is marvelous prose. There are finely honed epigrams. Snappy dialog. There are intertwined plot lines along surprising axes. This is a story of emigres from Europe and Asia and America, fleeing Fascism and Communism, patriarchy and the strait-jacket of religion, who land in Los Angeles, become caught up in the Great American Dream Machine and the rise of fascism and the coming of the World War Two and the Red Scare. There are emotional textures of shame and guilt and love and hate and unexpected tenderness. Like many of the best novels there’s both squalor and redemption, levity and gravitas, comedy and tragedy. We meet people in Marra’s books redolent with authenticity. Folks who shock, surprise, and delight us.
This very well may be a great book. I can’t tell by a first reading. There are passages that rival John Steinbeck’s last chapter in Grapes of Wrath. Great compassion is tempered by anger and hunger. All is possible, if improbable, in Marra’s world. A world before film, a place where you, the reader, can picture the characters and landscape in your own mind. Qué Viva reading!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibbqhTdNAUo
By Louis Segal. Louis was born in Oakland, raised his family in Oakland, dropped out of school in 1968, worked many jobs over the decades, dropped back into school in the 80s, got a Ph.D. in history, taught as an adjunct professor from 1993 to 2015. Retired but not withdrawn.
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