An Interview with Anthony Marra
Passages North’s own Fiction team lead, Millie Frankel, interviews Anthony Marra on his most recent novel, Mercury Pictures Presents, the research process, and the power of representation.
Millie Frankel: I was able to read your most recent novel, Mercury Pictures Presents, and your short story The Leopard, and it’s clear there's a ton of research that goes into your writing. I was curious to know how you approach the process of research.
Anthony Marra: I see research as being foundational to the creative process. Usually what happens is that I'll be working on a particular scene and need to look up a detail, or talk to someone, or visit a location in order to flesh out that scene. But in doing so, it then gives me an idea for a different scene, and the process sort of repeats itself.
One of the nice aspects about this process is that you end up finding your work moving in directions you never would have originally expected. So, in Mercury Pictures Presents, I was several years into writing and researching that book when I came upon the history of the German Village, and I immediately realized that this perfectly fits within the world of this book, and it was a place I only ended up in because of this process of letting the writing influence the research, and then the research influence the writing.
Millie Frankel: Do you find that you start with the writing, or you start with the research, or is it just a circular process?
Anthony Marra: For me, a book usually starts with a particular backdrop that I think has a lot of opportunity. I'm usually trying to think of what character will dramatically take advantage of that context in the most interesting ways. So for that short story, “The Leopard”, I came across this folio of photographs that had been censored under Stalinism, and I was fascinated with that idea of people being literally erased, and I began thinking, ‘well, what would be the most interesting way of approaching that?’ So I thought, ‘well, maybe a censor would be an interesting character.’ Then I thought, ‘well, what would be the most interesting kind of person to work in that particular profession?’ And I came up with somebody who has been trained as a portraitist and is using their particular skill set to erase rather than create. It's usually this way of trying to get at a character that most fully interrogates the contradictions and the complexities of a particular historical moment.
Millie Frankel: Can you talk a little bit about the German Village and how that does similar work in the novel?
Anthony Marra: German Village was an actual project that was run by the U.S. military, Standard Oil, and a number of Hollywood set designers, and the purpose was to try to understand how to create a firestorm in Berlin. To do so, the military constructed this small representative version of a series of German buildings. This was so fascinating in part because of the verisimilitude that these military advisors insisted upon. All of the furniture came secondhand from stores in German American neighborhoods and the structures used wood that had been shipped from Murmansk, Russia because it resembled the timber that the real German buildings were constructed out of. The purpose of this effort to get at molecular verisimilitude was to create the perfect conditions to test these incendiary devices.
The idea of these German exiles who were in charge of designing these buildings, that the closest they could come to returning home was on this parched bit of Utah desert, and the price of returning to this version of the homeland they'd been exiled from, was to collaborate in the real Berlin's destruction– that seemed to me a way of finding within the personal stories of these individual characters, a much larger story about the the paradoxes and the moral murkiness that so many people faced in the war.
Millie Frankel: Both texts that I read explore themes of propaganda and censorship. Why are those issues that you tend to come back to in your work?
Anthony Marra: One of the things that historical fiction is often about, or at least that my own historical fiction is often about, is the way that history becomes fictionalized. I think that ends up being one of the main projects of my work in those two particular books. There's something about the genre of historical fiction that often leads to either a sanitization of the past– a smoothing down of its complexities and nuances. Looking at how the past becomes dramatized in certain ways based on the political and social pressures characters face in the present– this becomes a way for me, at least, of trying to keep my own historical fiction as honest as possible.
Millie Frankel: Going off of that, I noticed there's a lot about both the power of narratives and the fallibility of narratives and representation in your work. Could you talk more about that?
Marra: As writers, as readers, we often want to think that stories are these unalloyed goodnesses, and that the very act of storytelling is, in itself, a morally legible endeavor. I think that if history teaches us anything, it's that storytelling, that art, can be put to use for the restriction of human flourishing and liberty as much as for its emancipation. I'm fascinated with how the stories a culture chooses to tell– what they choose to leave out, what they choose to censor or obscure– how that ends up revealing more about their pathologies, and their values, and their power structures than the story that's actually being told.
Millie Frankel: Do you want to talk about how that applies to the current day?
Anthony Marra: Anytime we're writing about the past, we're always writing about the present, and I certainly think that's been the case in my own work. My first book, a novel called A Constellation of Vital Phenomena which I wrote in the early 2010s, is set in Russia during the Russian-Chechen wars, but I was writing it with the war in Iraq very much in my mind. When I wrote my second book, The Tsar of Love and Techno, which came out in 2015, I was already noticing the ways in which the truth had already begun to be undercut, shall we say, by the rise of– Trump wasn't president yet– but that movement had already begun.
One of the beauties of using history as a way of understanding the present is that we not only see how the conflicts that we're dealing with today are oftentimes not new–that they have these long tails– but we also can see how people have responded to similar moments, whether with cowardice or with courage, with decency or indecency. It gives us an opportunity to see how we might have reacted then, and what we might do differently now.
Millie Frankel: In the description of Mercury Pictures Presents, you say you write about the “bit players.” The novel contains so many characters, yet they're all still so rich, even if they only get a few pages in the story. Why do you choose to write about every bit player in the story, and how do you approach characterization?
Anthony Marra: I love the idea of writing books without any minor characters. One of the things that a novel can do that few other art forms can, is to truly allow you to access the mind of every single individual who appears on the page, even if it’s just for a sentence or two. Particularly in Mercury, which is set not only in the world of Hollywood, but particularly among the minor players in that world, having a novel that reflected and dramatized the experience of these bit players walking in and out of the frame seemed worthwhile to me. I set myself a goal of trying to make these minor characters memorable enough that the reader would recall them even at the end of the book, even if they only appeared for a page. Narratively, one of the things that does is to constantly draw the focus away from our main characters towards these bit players, reminding the reader that we might be the central figures in our own life, but we aren't the only story. Any of these bit players could have carried the narrative themselves. It felt important to me to create a space within a novel where you get this very democratic and very inclusive sense of the scope of an industry and of a city.
Millie Frankel: It's an unusual technique to have so many characters and an omniscient narrator. Do you have any work that you're drawing from?
Anthony Marra: Yeah, absolutely. First would be the writer Edward P. Jones. He wrote The Known World, All Aunt Hagar's Children, and Lost in the City, and that's something that he does quite a lot. He is from Washington D.C. where I grew up, and is by far one of the biggest influences on my own work. Tolstoy is someone who I was thinking of a lot in terms of how he has no minor characters, particularly when I was working on my first two books, which are set in the former Soviet Union. At times, it seems as if everybody in the entire world of Tolstoy’s books gets a moment in the sunshine. There's a short story called “Safari” in Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan where she uses a similar technique in which she jumps ahead into the future of various minor characters.
Millie Frankel: You’ve talked about how you write about the landscape of exile. For a book about war there's not a ton of violence depicted on the page. Yet we see the slower, quieter violence of restriction of movement and expression. How would you describe this landscape?
Anthony Marra: There were a couple of things that I knew I wanted to avoid before I started working on Mercury. You can't walk into a bookstore without tripping on a stack of novels written about World War II–it's the most oversaturated period that appears in contemporary literature. So I wanted to try to approach it from a slightly different angle. It seemed to me that rather than writing about battles and bombs and all of that, it would be more interesting to write about how the war was perceived at the time through the most technologically advanced medium of the age. How was the war interpreted as it was unfolding? That question immediately drew me to the world of the movies, where I could look at how the war was represented, how villains were depicted. How did America choose to see itself? How did it choose to see its enemies? How did it choose to see Japanese Americans, German Americans, Italian Americans? In what ways did the act of representation serve war aims? How did these dramatizations affect the way that Americans were willing or unwilling to countenance things like internment camps? All of these seemed like interesting questions that more traditional World War II novels that focus on landing on the beaches and what have you, maybe aren't as primed to address.
So I was interested in that general topic, and then it's like okay, what would be the most interesting group of characters to explore it? So I thought, well, you could do a big studio, but that's sort of been done. So, what about one of these Poverty Row B-movie studios that tended to be places where European exiles would find work because they needed to to get a job, and these places needed employees who were willing to work on the cheap? The idea of a movie studio that was largely staffed by exiles, who were in turn asked to create movies that in some ways justified the very restrictions placed on their liberty and their rights– this seemed like a really morally tangled situation that perhaps would be able to muddy the versions of that time period that divide into neat good versus evil narratives.
Millie Frankel: The book also covers the confino in San Lorenzo, which is a fictional town in Italy. That also seems like its own type of exile that's contrasted with the exile in America.
Anthony Marra: Yeah. This was in 2014, 2015 and at that point I'd been thinking for a while about a book set in the exiled community in LA. And at the same time, I'd also here and there been kicking around an idea about a book set in Southern Italy where my dad's side of the family originates from. I was visiting this island called Lipari, which is one of the Aeolian islands off the coast of Sicily that my great-grandmother is from. I was there with my wife, and it's this postcard-perfect island, and on one of our last days there we saw this little plaque that had been mounted to the Citadel wall that was honoring the various antifascists and intellectuals who had been been sentenced to confino on this island.
I remember just looking around and thinking, ‘this is like paradise,’ yet it became hell for these people. In fact, Lipari was the largest destination for confinati under Mussolini’s reign, and this was never a part of the history that had ever been communicated to me by my family. And I remembered that there was this term that German Jewish exiles used to refer to Los Angeles, that it was “Sunny Siberia.” And I remember thinking that this place in Southern Italy, for the confinati who were stuck there, it was also a sunny Siberia. And that was the moment that I saw the story of these two sunny Siberias on either end of the world. One of the things that the book is working through is how American society increasingly adopted aspects of the very system that they were fighting against during the war, in terms of the restrictions that they placed on so-called enemy exiles.
Millie Frankel: There's a lot of humor in the book even in very serious and dark moments. Why do you incorporate humor into your writing?
Anthony Marra: I think that humor is one of the great overlooked tools in a novelist's toolbox, just on a craft level, it can do so many things. There's nothing that creates a stronger sense of readerly sympathy and identification with a character than a joke. If you're laughing with a character, then you're willing to follow them quite a ways. I think that modulating comedy and tragedy over the course of a book is a really effective way of keeping a reader slightly off their balance. The more comic a book is, the more those moments of tragedy really hit home. We make jokes, we laugh every single day, it's an elemental aspect of human life, and I think that to not encompass that in literature, you're leaving out an essential thing. Humor and comedy feels like both a really useful way of creating certain narrative effects on the page in terms of drawing the reader in, but I think more importantly, it's a way of giving an honest account of life as I understand it.
Millie Frankel: Have you seen any good movies recently?
Anthony Marra: So my favorite director who I actually came upon through the act of researching this, is a guy by the name of Ernst Lubitsch. He was a German-Jewish director who came to Hollywood in the 20s, but he was essential in creating this film fund to help European-Jewish filmmakers escape and get them set up in Hollywood. He was the mentor to Billy Wilder, who had this sign over his desk that said ‘what would Lubitsch do?’
His two best movies, I think, are called To Be or Not to Be and Ninotchka. To Be or Not to Be came out in 1942 and is set in German-occupied Warsaw, and it's about this cast of Shakespearean actors who are trying to escape occupied Poland. Ninotchka is about this commissar named Ninotchka, played by Greta Garbo, who comes to Paris and falls in love with an aristocrat and becomes convinced of the virtues of capitalism. In both cases, they're these comedies set against terrible historical backdrops, and in both cases, he's making them as these events are actually happening. Ninotchka came out a year or two after the Great Terror that Stalin unleashed in Russia. To Be or Not to Be came out while Poland was still occupied. In both cases, Lubitsch uses comedy as this scalpel. It's so sharp and so dark, but he uses it to expose the cravenness and the cruelty and inhumanity of these systems, but he does it with such a light touch that you almost don't realize what he's doing as he's doing it. They feel like they could be released today, and you would be like, ‘oh my gosh that’s genius.’
In fact, Ninotchka was one of the first movies my wife and I saw together, and as we were thinking of what we were going to name our daughter many years later, the one name we agreed upon was Nina, in part because of the film. Our daughter's nickname is Ninotchka.
Millie Frankel: I was curious, do you have any works in progress at the moment?
Anthony Marra: I just got edits back on my next novel which will likely come out next fall. It's set in Washington, D.C., both in 2007 and the McCarthy era. It's narrated by this fact checker who is essentially trying to understand if she has interpreted the story of her life correctly, and there are certain misdeeds in her past that she may have tried to gloss over in certain ways. So it's very much in keeping with other works of mine.
Millie Frankel: A lot of your work deals with repressive governments and systems, but you tend to write characters who are working within the confines of these systems, but are also kind of trying to do good within them.
Anthony Marra: Yeah absolutely. I think that there are very few out-and-out heroes in the world. Most of us find ways of accommodating ourselves to the systems we find ourselves within. Those characters are more interesting because they raise the questions of, how do you square what you do with your conscience? How do you learn to live with yourself? In what ways do you press back against these systems you find yourself within? What are you willing to risk? What are you unwilling to risk? Again, it’s that morally murky space that I find most dramatically compelling because it forces characters to struggle with difficult decisions. Dramatically, there's nothing quite as interesting as a character faced with only bad decisions.
Anthony Marra is the New York Times bestselling author of Mercury Pictures Presents, The Tsar of Love and Techno, and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, which was a New York Times notable book of the year. Among other honors, he has won a Whiting Award and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, as well as fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
