Book Look: Mercury Pictures Presents, by Anthony Marra

 This is the most satisfying thing I’ve read in a long time. It’s simultaneously funny and heartbreaking, authentic and quixotic, intelligent, absorbing, and masterfully written.

Ostensibly the story is about Maria, a plucky Italian emigree who, as WW2 erupts across Europe, flees Fascist Italy and a haunting, horrible mistake to make a new life in America as the assistant to the head of Mercury Studios, a struggling Hollywood filmmaking company. In truth, however, this book is no more about Maria than it is about the constellation of splendidly realized “bit players” who orbit her: eccentric movie studio bosses and washed up actors, wisecracking emigrees and meddling Italian relatives, beleaguered bureaucrats and ambitious blond secretaries, sentimental prostitutes, mourning mothers, doomed idealists, and racketeers with hearts of gold - characters whose stories, in Marra’s deft hands, are fully as complex and riveting and emotional as the central narrative that binds them together.

If you’re looking for something that will keep your book club talking late into the night, this novel provides plentiful fodder for discussion: the ways in which both Hollywood and the novel’s large cast of emigrees reinvent reality from discarded scraps of the past; the Faustian bargains that so many characters are forced to make in order to protect themselves, their values, or the people they love; the abundant ironies and idiocies of war; the difficulties of making peace with injustice and fate and our own mistakes. Marra’s writing may be empathetic, but it’s also penetrating and perspicuous.

If you’re fascinated by authentic historical detail about Hollywood in its infancy, if you enjoy your heartbreak with a side of incisive humor, if you admire characters who endure hardship with resiliency, grace, and decency, then you're in for a treat. My only regret is that I’ll now have to wait a while before being able to justify re-reading this; but at least that gives me time to explore some of Marra’s other novels in the meantime.