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Delayed Rays of a Star, by Amanda Lee Koe (Doubleday, 400 pages)
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HIPPO | AUGUST 22 - 28, 2019 | PAGE 44
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The scene is Berlin, 1928. Three up-and-coming movie stars attend a glamorous industry soirée: Marlene Dietrich, a silent film actress who will denounce her German citizenship and side with the Allies; Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American actress to appear on the silver screen; and Leni Riefenstahl, a German actress who will become the first female director and later the director of Nazi propaganda films. The photograph taken that night serves as the catalyst for this novel. Although Delayed Rays of a Star is a work of fiction, its protagonists are real figures from history. Author Amanda Lee Koe imagines these women’s lives beyond what can be proved as biographical facts, making for enticing contemplation. This book straddles across 80 years, four countries, half a dozen points of view, and the line between fiction and nonfiction. To call this novel “ambitious” is putting it lightly. It takes a few chapters for the pacing to gain its bearings. The opening chapter establishes the points of view of Marlene, Anna May and Leni, but it pivots too quickly to an 80-something-year-old Marlene and a disproportionate perspective of her maid, Bébé. However, readers need not worry that the additional perspectives — of Bébé, a Jewish writer friend of Anna May’s, an Afrika Korps member turned best boy on Leni’s movie set, and others — might distract from the stories of the larger-than-life personalities. The collected points of view flesh out each setting with grounding details about the sociopolitical climate that might not have been achieved by stepping into the shoes of a movie star alone. What’s most satisfying about this novel is how Koe fills in the gaps of history where biographies can only speculate. She’s not shy about imagining how Marlene might have seduced Anna May, and how both their personal and professional relationships would evolve as they worked on the set of Shanghai Express together. From the very beginning, Koe contrasts Marlene’s overt bisexuality and Anna May’s coy flirtations with Leni’s conservatism. (Leni makes her contempt for crossdressing men evident in the first scene.) They’re all complicated women with outer charm and inner turmoil, but Koe paints sympathetic portraits of Marlene and Anna May while she carefully avoids an antihero portrayal of Leni. While Marlene is able to launch her Hollywood career despite the rumors of her less than discreet affairs with both men and women, Hollywood is not as kind to Anna May because of its prevalent racism. The Motion Picture
Production Code and laws against interracial relationships prevent Anna May from kissing a white costar, which means she’s effectively shut out from leading lady roles. Anna May, a second-generation American, is forced into bit parts that birth the “dragon lady” stereotype in Hollywood. When she realizes that her characters are always crude villains who usually die, she sticks up for herself in public interviews, but villains of color and untimely deaths for characters of color are tropes that media still struggles with today. More unnerving are the parallels of burgeoning Nazism to American politics today. Is a far-right leader cause for concern? Nothing to be done now, since he was elected by democratic vote. Person of a certain ethnicity being stopped at the border? “We are just following protocol, and you do not possess the required paperwork. We reserve the right to refuse entry.” In this book, Leni prolongs the shooting of her movie Tiefland so she can ignore the war and keep her crew safe in the mountains for as long as she can. At the same time, she receives her funding from the Ministry of Propaganda and has a personal connection to Hitler himself. Koe portrays the self-delusion of a woman who thinks she’s a kind person just doing what needs to be done to protect her own way of life. But when push comes to shove she sends the Roma and Sinti extras back to the concentration camp where she had plucked them from. The different plot lines feel discordant at first, but Koe blends them together masterfully as the novel progresses. Ultimately, the overarching theme of Delayed Rays of a Star can be boiled down to the line, “Why are we only able to aestheticize or abhor difference?” B — Katherine Ouellette