Mercury Pictures Presents

Another central concern of Anthony Marra’s novel is how the immigrant experience leads to a fragmentation of identity and interpersonal connections.

Throughout the novel, immigration is associated with a fragmentation of the self—the creation of an irreparable divide between the individual’s roots and memories in the country of origin and the new life and identity created in America. This division is first presented symbolically in the passport photographs that Nino and his mother keep for immigrants from San Lorenzo. The two halves of the passport photos are so different that it is hard to believe they belong to each other. Maria describes the difference between the two parts as unfathomable: “Maria couldn’t fathom the distances compressed into the seams of these reassembled passport photos” (31).

The fragmentation of self is further emphasized in the hybrid names of the characters. Vincent Cortese, Eddie Lu, and Philip Ahn all combine Anglicized first names with surnames that belong to their country of origin. When Nino Picone moves to America, he is thus doubly removed from his original identity, adopting Vincenzo’s name and identity but also anglicizing and falsifying his stolen name. Eddie finally fulfills his theatrical ambitions by denying his original identity altogether, making the move from screen to radio, so that his physical appearance is invisible, and adopting the fully anglicized name of Eddie Lewis. The recurrent allusions to Frankenstein’s monster in the novel symbolically evoke this sense of hybridity and fragmentation. Like the immigrant characters in Marra’s novel, the monster is a composite being, made of diverse parts roughly sewn together and not fully belonging anywhere.

For Concetta and Annunziata, interminable loss and instability are countered by a desire to own a piece of land of their own, put down roots, nurture new life, and bury the dead. Annunziata loses her family and original home through an earthquake and tsunami—through a physical dislocation and sweeping away of the ground beneath her feet. Her mother and other relatives disappear completely, seeming to have “dissolved into the froth” of the floods. Her reaction to this is to buy a burial plot—to seek to re-root and re-stabilize herself in the land:

Several of her relatives, including her mother, had vanished into the water that day, disappearing with such finality it seemed they hadn’t drowned but dissolved into the froth. After Annunziata moved North and married Giuseppe, she purchased herself a plot in Rome’s Verano cemetery. The mason she spoke with guaranteed his tombstones would remain legible for at least two thousand years. When the time came, she wanted her name inscribed in big, capitalized letters, so no one would have any trouble finding her (28).

When her imagined stability in Rome is swept away once more by political turmoil, she carries the earth from the burial plot to America with her. In moments of distress, she carries the suitcase to the train station, imagining disappearing into the vast, unfamiliar country in which she finds herself. With this image, Marra again symbolically evokes the fragmentation of self—the irreconcilable division between the rooted and uprooted parts of the individual identity. Annunziata makes a tenuous peace with her adopted country when she mixes the soil from her burial plot with the topsoil in her Los Angeles vegetable garden, but her life is metaphorically uprooted once more when she is obliged to destroy the garden following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Maria and Annunziata finally gain a modicum of closure with the memory of Giuseppe when they return to Rome and erect a tomb to memorialize him on Annunziata’s burial plot. When asked for advice following the breakup of Mercury Studios, Annunziata tells her daughter to “[g]et something no one can steal from under [her] feet” (364). Concetta similarly dreams of owning “a little piece of land to call her own” (394). Like Annunziata, for a long time, she owns only the carefully tended cemetery plots of her children. Nino seeks to make amends at the end of the novel by buying her “a bungalow with a great big orange tree in the backyard” (403).

This sense of dislocation and uprooting is reflected in a rupture of intergenerational ties. Maria grows increasingly estranged from Annunziata as she adapts to life in her adopted country while her mother remains rooted in Italy and the past. Artie’s son, Billy, urinates into his father’s laundry hamper every night, and Ned emphasizes that his son would never survive in the business to which he has dedicated his life. Both Annunziata and Ned stress that, paradoxically, this alienation of children from their parents is the price they have paid for giving the younger generation chances that the older generations never had. As Ned puts it, “By bettering their lot in life, we doom them to misunderstand us” (72).

Maria expresses a similar sentiment at the end of the novel when she reflects on the pride she feels in Maria’s inability to understand her: “Maria had said she wanted to understand her mother. Ridiculous. She was proud of all she didn’t understand of her daughter. Proud that Maria had gone beyond the reach of her help” (364).

The immigrant experience is also characterized by paradox and conflicting loyalties. Anna expresses frustration with the demand that she be grateful to her adopted country. The demand for gratitude rests on the assumption that the immigrants are somehow guilty for the actions of the regime from which they are fleeing and ignores the constant persecution and discrimination that they experience in America. To get by in Hollywood, immigrants are forced to enact and embody racist caricatures. Eddie can only earn a living by confirming anti-Japanese stereotypes. German Jews are forced to play the Nazi officials from whom they fled.

It is also paradoxical that marginalized groups frequently find themselves in conflict with each other and benefit from the persecution of social groups who are lower down in the social hierarchy. Even though he was born in America, Eddie Lu’s Chinese ethnicity ensures that he has a lower social status and a lesser degree of agency than the more recently arrived Caucasian immigrants. As an African American, Louis finds it easier to enjoy the privileges of American citizenship in Germany than in America.

In sum, the experience of the immigrant characters in Marra’s novel is characterized by fragmentation, dislocation, and paradox.