Sunnyside by Glen David Gold

Sunnyside Reviews

• 
  Patrick O'Duffy

  Glen David Gold's first novel, Carter Beats the Devil, was a decent enough book that didn't quite manage to live up to its potential, and suffered because it came out at roughly the same time as Michael Chabon's far superior Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, against which the flaws of Gold's work became even more apparent. But his second novel, Sunnyside, is leaps and bounds ahead of Carter, a brilliant and emotionally genuine book that explores pain, sacrifice, war and the birth pangs of Hollywood, let down only by the fact that about 20% of the book is basically unnecessary.
  
  Sunnyside follows three characters over the course of 1916 to 1919. Leland Wheeler is a young, handsome lighthouse keeper who wants to be a film actor, but ends up going to war in France instead. Hugo Black is a snobbish Detroit dilettante who thinks himself too good for America, so ends up fighting the war in Russia. And Charlie Chaplain is a genius comedian and performer tormented by feelings of his own failures and inability to connect with the people he entertains. They all have dreams. They all get some kind of chance to fulfill those dreams. They all fall short.
  
  Gold picks out the journeys of all three men against a meticulously researched historical background that feels genuine and engaging, never descending into lectures and infodumps; more than anything else, he delves into the emotions of the men and the emotions around them, with prose that starts a little stiffly but finds its feet within a few chapters and really takes off. He's also not afraid to bend the rules of the sprawling historical epic, with occasional moments of absurdism, magical realism and comedy. There's some wonderful writing here, from laugh-out-loud to horrifically sad; I was on the verge of tears towards the end, as a deftly foreshadowed bit of tragedy came to fruition and made me dread reading the final pay-off.
  
  But there is a flaw to the novel, and it's a big one - one of the core narratives is superfluous. Although Leland and Chaplain only meet once, their characters thematically mirror each other in satisfying ways. Leland wants to be an actor, but ends up a soldier; Chaplain wants to change a world at war but is stuck making work he doesn't respect. They don't swap places, but both of them move from those positions in a way that contrasts and contextualises the other's journey. Hugo Black's story, on the other hand, doesn't belong in this novel; it doesn't connect to the other two in any meaningful way, nor does it provide extra context or resonance. It's a good story, and it deserved better development, but ultimately it could have been cut. It's already a minor element, taking up much less than a third of the book, but that's still more than it should have had here in this book.
  
  That said, "more good story here than required" is a pretty minor flaw for most readers, and the rest of Sunnyside soars and saddens despite the occasional cuts to the extraneous. It has drama and melodrama, laughs and tears, plot twists and performing dogs, and it absolutely sets Gold up as a major American author in a way that Carter Beats the Devil failed to do. Highly recommended. But you may need a hanky at the end.
• 
  Margaret Schoen

  Wow. I wanted to like this. I really enjoyed "Carter Beats the Devil," Gold's first book. So I was excited for this one. But I just couldn't get into it, and gave up a few chapters in.
  
  Gold weaves in millions of period details and facts, and characters, which is great. But the writing is just so dense, and he seems to have a deep antipathy to clearly identifying *which* of the myriad characters is speaking, or thinking, or being discussed. I kept flipping back and forth going "Wait, what? who is that? When did he/she come into the story?"
  
  "Carter Beats the Devil" had a similar massive scope, but it worked somehow. This just read like he had lots of ideas, and lots of research, and transcribed them all into the book from notcards, without bothering to write any of the connecting passages that would add some cohesiveness.
• 
  Ryan

  Every chapter that focuses on Pickford, Fairbanks, and Chaplin is like hearing my favorite song be played over and over. It paints beautiful - and sometimes tragic - portraits of all three legends ad makes me wish I could have been witness to this moment in movie history for even a day.
  
  Even the critic Munsterberg whose work I came to appreciate last year gets a moment in the sun.
  
  However the chapters on the warfront did nothing for me. Glimmers might have been haunting; whole chapters seemed distracting.
  
  But then there's this, spoken in the face of tragedy;
  
  "...was life basically random, and were our agile human brains trained in analogy and connecting dots, always making constellations out of chaos? Or was there a deeper meaning, and was it when we were in touch with the divine that we allowed ourselves to see it? Every moment of belief was actually about choosing belief, and that was what he called faith. Perhaps one moment in the future, every person in this room would again have some kind of faith."
  
  Amen.
• 
  Charles Matthews

  Sunnyside pops and crackles with cleverness. Which probably won't surprise anyone who read Glen David Gold's debut novel, Carter Beats the Devil. Like that novel, Sunnyside is rooted in the popular culture of the American past – the earlier book in the heyday of vaudeville, the new one in the formative days of the American film industry.
  
  The central character in Sunnyside is Charlie Chaplin, whom we first see (or think we see) on November 12, 1916, in a boat off the Northern California coast, being carried to his death on the rocks near the St. George Reef lighthouse. At the same instant, Chaplin is being sighted – or rumored to be present or arriving – in communities across the United States.
  
  Obviously, Chaplin didn't die in 1916, nor was he everywhere at once on that day when, Gold asserts in an end note to his book, such an instance of “mass hysteria” actually occurred. But whether this was a parapsychological phenomenon or just an ingenious publicity stunt doesn't concern Gold. It serves in the novel only to set several stories in motion – that of Chaplin's emergence as a cultural phenomenon, but also that of Leland Wheeler, the lighthouse keeper's son, and that of Hugo Black, who gets caught up by accident in a Chaplin-inspired melee in Beaumont, Texas. Eventually, the tall, handsome Leland, who wants to be a movie star, will wind up in the trenches of France during World War I. And solitary, bookish Hugo will go to Russia as part of the abortive Allied expedition against the Bolsheviks after the revolution of 1917. By accident, Leland finds a kind of vicarious stardom. Hugo's fate is sadder and stranger.
  
  Sunnyside is a rich concoction of a novel, a melange of historical fact, biographical speculation and outright fantasy, teeming with so many characters that a reader welcomes the list of them in the front of the book. But for all that popping and crackling cleverness – or perhaps because of it – it's also a bit ramshackle. The saga of Hugo, for example, sits rather oddly in the narrative, partly because Hugo himself is not very interesting as a character; during the Russian campaign, Gold devotes more attention to the general in charge, Edmund Ironside, than to Hugo.
  
  To the novel's credit, Gold skillfully sets historical figures – of which Ironside is one – amid fictional ones, reinforcing the comparison to writers such as E.L. Doctorow that his first novel elicited. Gold excels at evoking place and milieu. He lives in San Francisco, where much of the past jostles with the present, so it's not surprising that he gets the city's geography right. But he also takes the reader to places like silent-era Hollywood, the front in France, Berlin in the time of the Kaiser, and, in the frozen north of Russia, Arkhangelsk. At the same time, his dialogue often seems anachronistic, perhaps intentionally so, with locutions that sound more like 2006 than 1916. Example: “'What does that mean?' Andy cried. 'What does that even mean?'”
  
  The strongest aspect of his novel is a persuasive take on Chaplin, a man as complicated as his persona, the little tramp, was simple. Gold's Chaplin is an artist with “the easy capacity for seeing kinetic actions first, then creating character and emotion to fill them up, like ladling sand into a sack.” He would launch into a motion picture with only a situation in mind, not a script, and through trial and error – lots and lots of error and miles and miles of film – arrive at a coherent story. “On every movie, his creative spirit followed the same arc: absolute certainty, doubt, dread, horror, despair, new certainty (sending him into a new compass heading that was 45, 90, or even 270 degrees from where his first certainty had sent him), and then the Sargasso. Then something saved him. Then he was home.” Unfortunately for Chaplin, real life, such things as business and family and marriage and politics, can't be fixed in the editing room.
  
  Gold is a wizard at making things up and mixing them in with things not made up. But sometimes the mixture is unstable. There are whole chunks of the novel – the Russian campaign and indeed almost everything involving Hugo Black, and the extended section dealing with the wild West show produced by Leland's father – that seem as if they had thrust themselves irresistibly on Gold's imagination and demanded to be written into the book. But novels can be fixed in the editing room. And Sunnyside, for all its undeniably entertaining flash and dazzle, might have been a better book if it had been.
  
  
  
• 
  Ron Charles

  Glen David Gold's new novel takes its title and perhaps too much of its spirit from Charlie Chaplin's weirdest movie, a rare financial flop called "Sunnyside." At just 34 minutes long, the 1919 film cobbled together several incongruous scenes, including some classic slapstick, a surreal dance with wood nymphs, a violent suicide and a baffling happy ending. Having already made more than 60 movies before he was 30, the Little Tramp could take a pass for this creative misstep, but Gold sees the film as the culmination of personal and professional crises in the artist's life, and uses it as the finale to this brilliant though swollen biographical novel.
  
  Fans of his delightful first book, "Carter Beats the Devil," have waited eight years for this second one -- at that rate Joyce Carol Oates would have to live to 400 -- but it's obvious now what Gold has been up to. "Sunnyside" is like the smartest kid in the class, who calls out the answer to every question. Gold doesn't just know Chaplin's life and work and the lives and works of fellow movie stars Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Rin Tin Tin, et al.; he also knows everything about cameras, the psychological theories of Hugo Münsterberg, the development of the studio system, diamond cutting, lighthouses, World War I finances, machine guns and a thousand other subjects that burst from this fire hose of a novel.
  
  With that warning, I say, jump into the spray. As discombobulating as the book is as a whole, its parts are magnificent, and "Sunnyside" is flooded with funny, horrible and downright bizarre details of early 20th-century life. Gold's dexterous voice can swing from the exuberant melodrama of silent film to the terror of doomed soldiers to the quiet despair of the world's most beloved man. Arranged like an old-time afternoon at the movies, "Sunnyside" begins with a "Newsreel" about a strange mania that gripped the nation on Nov. 12, 1916: All over the United States, for no apparent reason, people either believe they see Charlie Chaplin or are about to. In rowboats adrift at sea, in hotel lobbies, on baseball fields, at church picnics, in trains pulling into stations, everywhere people fall victim to this contagious delusion, dubbed "Chaplin-itis" by the Kansas City Star. It's a wide-angle, deeply amusing opening that sets the theme for Gold's exploration of the power and mystery of mass media.
  
  At this early point, the novel branches into three separate story lines. The effect is not so much like watching a triple feature as it is like darting in and out of every theater at the multiplex. In one, a priggish teenager named Hugo Black finds himself fighting in the Allies' disastrous (and largely forgotten) battle against the Bolsheviks in the frozen forests of northwest Russia. Another focuses on Leland Wheeler, a drop-dead-handsome young man who dreams of becoming a movie star but ends up servicing warplanes in France and returns home with the world's first canine celebrity. And the third story, the main one, follows Chaplin's tumultuous life during the war years when he moved through several women, became the highest-paid entertainer in the United States, canvassed the country to raise money for the War Department and helped found United Artists.
  
  There are so many dazzling episodes -- in such a wide variety of settings in so many different styles and tones -- that I began to think there was nothing Gold couldn't do. He creates a hilarious Wild West show a la Buffalo Bill that travels through prewar Berlin: covered wagons, drunken stunts, mock shootouts between cowboys and Indians. His portrayal of the Liberty Loan rally in San Francisco calls up a cast of thousands, choreographed in a celebration that borders on a riot. There's a battle scene in Russia involving a runaway train that's as comic as it is electrifying. Hollywood's rapidly developing climate of extravagance, insecurity and scandal is here, too, of course. And he's just as successful with intimate, poignant scenes, like the beach party put on by Samuel Goldwyn during which Chaplin sweats like a nervous teenager or the dinner prepared by abandoned Russian princesses in a forest overrun by communists.
  
  Most important, Gold has figured out how to make Chaplin strut and feint and dance in print. His depiction of him as a director -- ordering up sets and costumes and actors one minute, canceling them the next -- rings with all the music of the genius at work. In scenes of rich psychological acuity, Gold captures Chaplin's crippling depression, his sense of being constrained by his audience, his financiers and his own impossible standards, despite living at the center of "a tulipomania of appreciation." He is, as Gold says, "the physic of laughter who could never heal himself."
  
  But -- uncle! -- there's so much here, a great thundering jangle of characters, plots, subplots, detours and anecdotes. E.L. Doctorow has trained us to read these composite stories that weave together history and fiction, but Gold stretches this form to the ripping point. The connective tissue between all these wonderful scenes is usually missing or obscure, which pushes an inordinate amount of work onto the reader.
  
  And yet even as my patience wore out, Gold would suggest some startling correlation that reassured my faith in his ability to manage this operatic cast. Everything eventually turns on his exploration of cinema's intoxicating influence on human consciousness. Seeing the Kaiser on the toilet reading Photoplay while his empire collapses, or watching Bolshevik peasants project Mary Pickford's face on a sheet in their dark church -- in such strange moments the cascading pieces of this novel suddenly lock into place in the most evocative ways. Gold manages to convey how the reproduction and distribution of moving images enflames our imaginations and alters our nature like nothing else since the dawn of religion. For all its heavy demands, "Sunnyside" offers a wealth of wit and pathos and insight, and who better to guide us through this transformational moment in history than the Little Tramp?
  
  
  http://articles.washingtonpost.com/20...
• 
  Graceann

  I love Glen David Gold. I love him as a witty, personable man, and as a witty, engaging author. I adored CARTER BEATS THE DEVIL and found it to be lush and intricate, with numerous plot points that somehow, "magically" reunite for a satisfying novel. Perhaps it was wrong for me to set such a high standard for SUNNYSIDE, but I know what Gold can do at his best, and I waited a long time for this novel. When I heard that it was based (at least in part) on an era I love - that of Hollywood in the silent days, I was even more keen to read it.
  
  SUNNYSIDE starts off in a marvelous way. There was a single day when Chaplin appeared to hundreds of people in hundreds of places. This is something that actually happened and the description of mass hysteria that Gold gives us is a wonder to behold. The three main storylines are introduced here - Chaplin, Lee Duncan, and Hugo Black. Then they diverge, never to meet again except in the tiniest of moments early in the book.
  
  Chaplin is presented as a character who is conflicted and self-doubting (perhaps a fair portrayal; I've not read a great deal about the man). Interestingly, I found that the most engaging bits of his story had to do not with his filmmaking, but with his interactions with others - Douglas Fairbanks, Mildred Harris, Hannah Chaplin, Frances Marion and Mary Pickford (with whom he had a famously difficult relationship). There are two separate scenes - one with Mildred and one with Hannah, that are especially moving, and it was in these that I saw the glimmer of genius that I know so well from Gold's previous work.
  
  Next is Lee Duncan; a young lighthouse keeper who wants to make it big in Hollywood and stay as far from the battlefields of The Great War as possible. He is an interesting character and, to my mind, the best developed. The arc from callow youth to saddened man is carefully plotted and, at times, beautifully written.
  
  Finally, Hugo Black. I don't know what to say about this character, except, "why?" There is no reason for him to be present in this narrative, and removal of the whole subplot would not have hurt the story one bit. I think it would have been vastly improved, actually.
  
  It hurts my heart to say that I'm disappointed with something Glen David Gold has written. When I got to end of CARTER BEATS THE DEVIL, I said "oh, it's over already?" At numerous times during SUNNYSIDE, I found myself saying "when will it be over, already?" Glen David Gold is a marvelous writer, and when he's at the top of his game, there are few who can equal him for narrative scope and beauty of prose. Sadly, SUNNYSIDE is somewhat of a miss in that regard.
• 
  Ron

  I just love this book to pieces. It's smart, it's funny, it isn't afraid to let you fill in dots yourself as Gold explores Charlie Chaplin's role as the world's first global celebrity... but also how others, both famous and ordinary, make their way through the absurd world the rise of Hollywood and the ossification of European politics created. I really did laugh and cry in fairly equal measure. (I'm a sucker for dog stories, and this novel has a beaut.)
• 
  Rachael Singh

  I've given up on this. Beautiful writing at times, but I simply don't care enough about Charlie Chaplin or 1930s America to persevere with the story.
• 
  jordan

  
  What is one to make of Glen David Gold’s second act, “Sunnyside,” which comes more than seven years after his much praised first novel, “Carter Beats the Devil”? As with Carter, Gold again demonstrates his extraordinary gifts – characterization, humor, and perfectly metered prose, as well as exceptional research – are not for this author tricks but sheer magic. Yet where Carter followed a story that was linear and easily deciphered, “Sunnyside” follows not one track but several. And if like most readers you follow these various paths expecting that Gold will eventually bring them together in some tidy ending, you are sure to be disappointed. Instead these separate stories circle each other and occasionally almost, but never quite touch, having in common the period leading up to America’s involvement in World War I.
  
  Gold gives us one story of handsome Leland Wheeler, the son of a woman lighthouse officer and a Wild West scoundrel who dreams of Hollywood fame against his mother’s wishes; a family of Russian Jewish grifters who dream of riches; Hugo Black, an intellectual who searches for glory but has the misfortune of being sent to Siberia as part of the Allies ill conceived plan to undermine the new Bolshevik regime, and, of course, Charlie Chaplin. One hardly knows what to say about the Chaplin story, as it engages so many other varied plots, sub-plots and characters (and so many characters! Doug Fairbanks, Goldwyn, McAdoo, Zukor, Mary Pickford, Rin tin tin , etc, etc, etc) as Gold attempts to present and critique Hollywood’s formation.
  
  I cannot sufficiently praise either Gold’s prose or his research. Here is historical fiction presented by a master, who weaves a spectacular tapestry of facts, fiction, and opinion creating a whole that runs through with pathos and humor. His sentences sing and his observations often give a reader pause. So what is one to make of Sunnyside’s strange disassociated structure? From the novel’s outset Gold makes very clear that he sees in this period the birth of modern mass culture, with Chaplin filling the essential role of that culture’s celebrity. Perhaps that is why he organized the novel in this way, to demonstrate how disjointed society has become and reflect the impact of celebrity on its members.
  
  One cannot know for sure what this author intended, and at times one may become frustrated by the novel’s seemingly obtuse structure. One thing is certain, in the hands of a lesser writer, the attempt would have sunk into a disastrous morass and it is a testament to Gold’s tremendous talent that he can keep this work afloat and his reader engaged. One may puzzle over Gold’s intent, but Sunnyside offers no room to doubt his gifts.
  
  By any standard, Sunnyside is an unconventional piece of story telling and I am reticent to attach the word novel to a work so unusually structured. Many readers will find the work to not be their cup of tea and will wonder whether they should dive into its 500+ pages. I suspect even that those who enjoy it will find that it more than once leaves them scratching their heads. One thing is certain, Gold here undertakes something both unusual and memorable and I for one took considerable satisfaction in the
  
• 
  Judy

  
  The production of illusion, the competitive spirit of creative people, the magnetic appeal of the truly adept; these are the themes of David Glen Gold and also his techniques as a writer. Carter Beats the Devil, his amazing first novel, was about a magician. Sunnyside takes us into the early world of motion pictures through Charlie Chaplin.
  
  It is a long novel and in my opinion it is as long as it needs to be, though some critics disagreed. Gold takes a good 75 pages to get it all going. The three main characters are introduced, each with a compelling entrance, but I didn't know why the other two were there, because I had thought it was Charlie Chaplin's story. In fact, though their paths cross, you don't actually get the connection until almost the end of the book.
  
  Meanwhile, there is plenty to enjoy. Chaplin's early years in Hollywood, his rivalry and later friendship with Mary Pickford, his crazy mother and first marriage. In fact, all of the three main characters have their difficulties with parents. Gold has the same wonderful story telling style as in his earlier novel, a combination of irony, sentiment and dazzling set pieces.
  
  Several stunning scenes stand out including a Liberty Loan rally in San Francisco. Also a Hollywood party where Charlie meets his first wife and has a hilarious encounter with Mary Pickford's best friend. Then there is a miraculous dog rescue in the middle of war torn France. In fact, animals are everywhere in this story.
  
  What I loved most was the insight into Chaplin's creative process, which made me want to see his pictures, something I have never done. I could say that the end of Sunnyside is hopeful but not happy. An underlying tone of sorrow permeates the story, partly because of the war and mostly because no one gets what he or she truly desires.
  
  But I was increasingly drawn in by all the elements of this tale until when I finally came to the end, I wanted another 500 pages and more about an artist who for years was everywhere. At least I wanted another Glen David Gold book to read. I hope he doesn't make me wait so long for the next one, but if he must, I will just have to reread the first two.
• 
  James

  Sunnyside is without doubt one of the best books I've ever read. It took me a solid month to read, mainly because I didn't want it to end. Following the lives of 3 men - including Charlie Chaplin - in the period before, during and after the First World War, the book is packed with fascinating historical detail about early Hollywood, life on the western front, and the eastern, with romance, intrigue, performing dogs, mysterious appearances... And it's all written in a beautifully accessible style, with wit, humour, and passion for the period. Now I want to go away and watch more than the 2 Chaplin films I've already seen and read it all over again for a new perspective.
• 
  Jeffrey

  Like "Carter Beats The Devil", this book is good fun, and full of human moments. It's also really funny. My words can't do it justice, so I'll just highly recommend it to anyone looking for an emotionally resonant but very entertaining read.
• 
  Graham Wilhauk

  I wished I loved this. “Carter Beats the Devil,” Gold’s debut, is quickly becoming one of my absolute favorite books of all time. It may even be in my top 20 by now, if not top 15. While Gold’s writing STYLE was as great as ever, this book was just way too ambitious. Too much was trying to happened and only a third of it was anything great. Honestly, this book should have solely focused on Chaplin, making a VERY interesting novel about him. The parts about him were easily the best parts, but the problem was the rest of the book bored me to tears. While not bad at all, “Sunnyside” was nothing short of being mediocre. Honestly, just stick with “Carter.” (Still PUMPED about Gold’s memoir coming out this summer!)
  
  I am giving this one a 2.5 out of 5 stars.
• 
  Jenna

  Too long, boring.
  Not as good as his other book, carter beats the devil which I really liked.
• 
  Jana Perskie

  I received an ARC for "Sunnyside," and expected big things since the author had a bestseller with his first novel, ""Carter Beats The Devil." I was taken in, as were/are many readers by all the hype surrounding "Sunnyside's" publication. It does not make for a good read. I was determined to finish it, however, despite the book's 555 pages. Yes, I had to skim over parts - but I didn't skip anything, hoping for a page or two or ten, which would bring the narrative together. I wanted to post an honest review on Amazon.com.
  
  The storylines are many, too many, and the writing is very uneven. Gold takes off on one helluva surrealistic riff at supersonic speed early on. The sentences become increasingly longer and the pace becomes really manic. The author skips from character to character, from event to event, without a pause for breath. The plots and subplots reach a point where they seem unrelated.
  
  What this most reminds me of is E. L. Doctorow's wonderful novel "Ragtime," gone terribly wrong. "Ragtime has a huge cast of characters, multiple plots and subplots, and Doctorow not only holds it all together, but one never has to stretch to follow the various storylines. His characters are all so wonderfully depicted, and the writing is superb. "Sunnyside" is definitely not "Ragtime," neither in scope, depth, nor skill.
  
  For my full review go to the Amazon link below:
  
  
  http://www.amazon.com/Sunnyside-Glen-...
  
• 
  bup

  Does an emotional impact still count if you're not sure why you feel it?
  
  I like Gold's writing - sort of an short-attention-span smarty-pants thing - smatterings of 1910's American culture you're expected to just know - various silent movies, Krazy Kat, and the Four Minute Men; short phrases in French, Russian, German. Makes me feel smart without having to concentrate too much.
  
  And I really like Charlie Chaplin, and am interested in silent movies in general. I was disappointed to learn one of the Mary Pickford movies with ZaSu Pitts that was in the book is a lost film.
  
  So it was an absorbing read.
  
  But, with about a hundred pages to go, I asked myself 'what's the basic question I'm waiting to get answered?' and I couldn't answer that. By the time I finished, I realized that like its namesake movie, Sunnyside is about things not fitting together perfectly, and real life not supplying a clean narrative driving toward anything. Things don't make sense. The universe doesn't make patterns, we just perceive them. I get it.
  
  But Sunnyside was one of Chaplin's least successful films - financially and artistically (you know, I'm not really sure about financially, now that I mention it. The book implies it, but I think it did just fine. Not going to bother to research it). Maybe it wasn't the best structure to imitate.
• 
  Emma

  When I had a chance to snag an advanced copy of Sunnyside (2009) by Glen David Gold, I was really excited because Gold's first novel Carter Beats the Devil had piqued my interest and was already on my list of books to read. Having tried reading Sunnyside, it will have to stay on that list a bit longer before I decide if I will actually be reading it.
  
  To say I was daunted when I realized that this book was 550 pages long would be an understatement. Given the massive length of the book I expected, perhaps unfairly, a page-turner packed with so much action or at least so many interesting things that it would soon become obvious that Gold could not have told the story in any shorter length. I expected a novel that would grab my attention and hold it until I made it to some kind of stunning conclusion.
  
  Instead, I got a somewhat convoluted opening about a lighthouse and its keepers. Charlie Chaplin does make an appearance soon after, but not soon enough. And not in the way you would expect. The first chapter ends with a needless death--something else that diminished my interest in the book. I can't say too much about the ending, but it left me cold as well. In short, Sunnyside just wasn't what I had hoped it would be.
  
• 
  Jessica

  Forced and disjointed. The storylines for Leland, Hugo and the Golod clan were forced on the reader. And the very few parts with Chaplin were way too disjointed.
  
  I'm still struggling with why the characters above were included. Was it to show how the non-Hollywood folk lived? Was it an attempt to give depth to an otherwise bland story? Or was it simply, as is my belief, an attempt to add substance to a thin plot?
  
  I struggled mightily with every character introduced (with the exception of Nanette and Boy). Leland was flighty, arrogant and prone to dramatics. Hugo was detached from the world around him, to the detriment of his social development. The Golod family was too conniving and capable of misdeeds to be believed. And Charlie - at least, this author's portrayal of Charlie - was entirely unlikable.
  
  I wish I had know going in to this story that a good deal of it would be taken up with these characters who weren't Charlie Chaplin. I wish I could have separated my vision of Chaplin from the guy that the author presented. But I can't.
  
  Was he truly that dim? That unfocused? That mean?
  
  No. In my mind, no. My Chaplin is a genius. He's kind, a bit of a rogue, but with a compassionate heart and a quick wit. And that's what I'm going to cling to, story be damned.
• 
  Lindz

  In many ways this is a really good novel. It is really well written, metaphores are sometimes inspired. Images flow off the page like oil paint onto a canvas. The characters are interesting and generally do keep the pace going. Gold has a real affection for Charlie Chaplin, and the loving farce of the invasion of Russia is great until the tragedy of the ending, not ending in a marriage but death, as predicted by Chaplin himself. Though I have a feeling Gold tired of his Leeland Wheeler character mid way through the book, the story sagged and confused itself around the edges.
  
  Even Gold himself says this is a book about ideas, and indeed it is. So unfortunately I cannot not really tell you what the plot is of Sunnyside. It follows the theme of a mid turn of the century cinema, with three separate characters, most important Chaplin who is the centre. But nothing really links in a satisfactory way, you are pulled from one character to another, with no real segway.
  
  I gave this book three stars because well, it is a three star novel. I know you have a four star in your Gold, and I will keep reading you till I get it !!!
• 
  Alan

  The massive scope of this book begins with a day in 1916 where hundreds of Chaplins are simultaneously imagined around the world. It focuses on the other two main characters witnessing this bizarre event, a lighthouse keeper with Hollywood dreams and a brash young Texan, both of which will end up in the middle of World War One. Gold brilliantly blends fact and fiction (and as a film historian, I can attest to a lot of the early Hollywood stuff) to a point where the reader vicariously experiences this period in a way that no history book or film ever could manage. Brilliantly (yet unpretentiously) told, and impossible not to savor...much like Gold's first book, Carter Beats the Devil (which deals with Houdini in much the same way). Absolutely recommended to anyone who likes any kind of books, young or old. A masterpiece.
• 
  Leah

  I don't know what to say about this book! In general I love Glen David Gold, I think he's a wonderful writer and I love his attention to historical detail - I feel like I learn so much from him and I really enjoy that. However, I didn't feel entertained with this book as much as I did with Carter Beats the Devil. This book was engrossing, but also kind of depressing - I felt like it had a sort of downer overall message and there was a lot of WWI stuff and sad animal stuff and those were both hard for me to read. It may just be that the book this ended up being wasn't what I was in the mood for - I do think it's a good book, but it definitely bummed me out and I don't think I'll want to read it again.
• 
  Valerie

  I really tried to like this book, but I just couldn't, for two main reasons:
  
  1) I had great difficulty relating to the characters. While their depictions described them sufficiently to provide a decent picture of them, they did not in any way enable me to feel anything for them. And some of the characters' stories seemed to have absolutely no relevance to the central story of the book. Just a way to fill pages. I was particularly lost in the entire Russian story, with no compassion whatsoever for any of those characters.
  
  2) Perfectly subjective of course, but the writing style reminded me of Tom Robbins, and I just happen to not be much of a fan. Having said that, I do love Christopher Moore...!
• 
  Karen

  I loved every minute of this book and would have given it 5 stars if I understood how the four main characters are supposed to be connected. They do interact indirectly, and the movie business is a uniting theme, except for the one character who is off in northern Russia after WWI... Well, he does go around with a projector showing Charlie Chaplin movies. It's a loose connection at best. But I loved every one of the storylines and can forgive the fact that they seem barely related to each other.
• 
  Neil

  It's pretty rare for me to give up on a book but after 300+ pages and a couple of weeks of convincing myself that the author has a story to tell, this goes back on the shelf. A complete mess. The guy can write, but what is the point if he has no story to tell? Wafer thin characters, unrelated events and a complete lack of cohesion in the narrative meant every time I picked it up it was a chore. Gold's debut, Carter Beats the Devil, is one of my favourite books but this will rapidly find its way back to the Oxfam bookshop.
• 
  Kiersten Lawson

  I waited a long time for this after loving "Carter Beats the Devil" and hearing Gold read an excerpt from his working draft at the first Wordstock. This lovely romp through early 20th century Hollywood to the front lines of WWI and back met every expectation I had of it. His wife Alice Sebald has received more commercial attention, but Gold's prose to me is enchantment.
• 
  Erin Britton

  Probably the most frustrating thing about Glen David Gold’s writing is the length of time that he has taken between publishing his novels. Following the massive success of Gold’s debut novel, Carter Beats the Devil, fans have had to wait eight years for Sunnyside, his latest book. His first novel having been a fictionalised biography of the American magician Charles Joseph Carter, Gold has continued along a similar vein in Sunnyside, a fictionalised account of the career of Charlie Chaplin, the birth of Hollywood and the impact of the First World War on life in America. Similarly, one of the major themes of Carter Beats the Devil was the occurrence of seemingly impossible events, an idea which Gold has developed further to form the mass delusions that provide the excellent opening sequences of Sunnyside.
  
  On November 12th 1916, Californian lighthouse keeper Leland Wheeler informs his mother that something is very wrong. Quickly taking up her telescope, Emily Wheeler is just in time to spy a small boat being piloted by the unmistakable figure of Charlie Chaplin as, buffeted by waves, it drifts towards rocks and inescapable disaster. This turns out to be just the first in a series of over 800 sightings of Chaplin that occur on the same day all over the country as Americans seek desperately for some distraction from their upcoming entry into the First World War. These sighting are disturbing for all involved but particularly for Chaplin who, having been elevated to super-stardom, is just beginning to experience doubts about himself.
  
  At this point Sunnyside diverges to follow three disparate characters. Chaplin tries to concentrate on his career while taming his wandering heart, battling studio executives, facing questions about his patriotism and preparing himself for the arrival in Los Angeles of his loved yet still dreaded mother. Leland Wheeler discovers that he is in fact the son of the world’s last Wild West star and determines to move to Hollywood to become an actor. His ambitions thwarted by America’s entry into the war in Europe, Wheeler heads to the trenches of France little realising that when he finally makes it big in Hollywood, it will be as manager to the world’s first canine megastar. Meanwhile, Hugo Black finds himself under the command of the famous British General Edmund Ironside and embroiled in the often overlooked conflict against the Bolsheviks in the newly created USSR. A massive chorus of other characters, both real and fictional, become tangled up in the lives of the three leads as they, and America, head toward the modern age.
  
  With Carter Beats the Devil, Glen David Gold created an almost perfect novel that mixed sublime storytelling with a compulsive narrative and pitch perfect characters, and with Sunnyside he comes very, very close to reaching the same level. Sunnyside is a great, sprawling novel comprised of finely woven threads of fiction and fact that continually entertains but does demand quite a bit of concentration and patience from the reader. Gold has done a marvellous job of recreating people and places but he does occasionally stray into the realm of too much information. Amongst the numerous entertaining subplots there are a few, the history of Liberty Loans for example, could perhaps have been edited out without detracting anything from the story. Ultimately though, there is so much great, enthralling material in Sunnyside that any minor flaws disappear into insignificance and the reader is rewarded with an epic bittersweet story about the various forms that the American dream can take.
• 
  Trav S.D.

  I'm laboring under a couple of mild handicaps when it comes to reviewing Glen David Gold's novel Sunnyside (which is now out in paperback). I hadn't read his popular first novel Carter Beats the Devil (although I inevitably will now, though -- too late the hero!) And, of all Chaplin's post-Essanay films, Sunnyside is, without a doubt, the one I know least well, having seen it but once, probably twenty years ago. I have however internalized its reputation. I think of it as a film of Chaplin's awkward growing period, his artistic adolescence. The film is ambitious but inexpert, and tries to enforce a pathos Chaplin has not yet learned how to earn. In the chronicle of his career it occupies a place I think analogous to the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour – the first failure of a popular artist previously considered invincible. It is a hinge, a turning point, and therefore an important “keystone” (forgive me) to understanding this important twentieth century figure. And understanding this famously enigmatic genius is one of the vicarious (if illusory) joys of this highly original novel.
  
  Is there a name for this popular genre? I think “historical fiction” is all wrong, because it carries with it an inherent contradiction in terms and also a certain imprecision (aren’t Herodotus and Lillian Hellman also authors of historical fictions?) But I’m a dilettante and a Johnny-Come-Lately to the book business. I’ve only read a few of the most famous examples in this genre: Doctorow’s Ragtime, Carr’s The Alienist, Kevin Baker’s Dreamland, and several things by Michael Chabon. Such books are informed by the close reading of history, using certain events (and myriad period details) as a jumping off point for pure imagination. The first part of the descriptive tag should therefore at the very least always be placed in quotes, thus: “historical”, for such books (if anything) are in the tradition of Poe’s “Balloon Hoax” – true seemingworks of fantasy, no more. Let the buyer beware. This is a soup-to-nuts “what if”. Go with it, yes, but always keep in mind that the deceptively rich fabric exists only in the author’s alternate universe.
  
  To confuse matters further, there’s that truthful truism: reality is so often stranger than fiction. Thus, plenty of the least plausible elements in Gold’s novel are actually based on fact. The opening vignette, for example, in which innumerable people report simultaneous sightings of Charlie Chaplin in disparate locations all over the country -- it actually happened. Thus with plenty of incidents and details in the book. Others are half-factual, warped, spliced onto daydreams. Savor it all cum grano salis.
  
  Now: to particulars: the book is best read as an epic of World War I. This is most welcome. This important period is too seldom represented in popular culture. Like a plate spinning act, we zip back and forth among three separate, parallel stories. These are thematically connected but scarcely if ever intertwined narratively. One follows silent comedy star Charlie Chaplin as he gropes his way from dissatisfying success toward meaningful artistry, his emotional distance both a help and a hindrance in the process. At the same time we follow the separate fortunes of two soldiers. One is a hapless lighthouse-keeper with dreams of Hollywood stardom, but whom instead gets sent to the fields of France where he discovers (spoiler alert) the puppy who will become Rin Tin Tin. The other is a young engineer who for no very good reason gets sent to the frozen wastes of Russia to fight against Bolsheviks, a true (and unfortunately obscure) incident in American history. The supporting cast includes a family of itinerant swindlers, a second rate Buffalo Bill wanna-be, Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo, and a bevy of Hollywood notables, including Fairbanks, Pickford, Zukor, et al.
  
  This is a detailed landscape, one beautifully drawn. Gold's mastery of the musical sentence is thorough. I enjoy the way he writes as much as the subject to which he turns his pen. If he too often succumbs to regurgitating newly acquired vocabularies as a result of his research, that is a common enough foible. He more than compensates with the dozens of sentences that had me going, "Well! I never heard [name that thing] described in THAT way before!". The joy of discovery roils throughout; reading his writing is like being scrubbed with a loofah. His mind is often as metaphorical as Chaplin’s. Just as in The Pawnshop, Charlie turns an alarm clock into a sardine can, a hospital patient, and a half dozen other apt but surprising things, Gold writes of a stubbed cigarette splintering "like rotten wood", or of a cruel observation being "the stab of a stiletto".
  
  Parts read like slapstick -- no shortage of sloppy fistfights, bi-plane launchings, locomotive races, and the like. Other parts are black comedy. The war sections are undergirded with grim irony and absurdism more reminiscent of WWII writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller than, say, Hemingway. And the blacker-than-black image that ends the novel is not far away from certain pictures in The Gold Rush or Monseiur Verdoux. The bridge between the very different worlds of slapstick and black comedy is of course Chaplin himself -- Gold seems to shine a klieg light on the process of how he made that leap. It is the author's deep understanding of Chaplin, or his version of Chaplin, that is most rewarding. One of the vicarious thrills of the book is that it feels like we are getting really close to the great clown, inside his complicated head, even as he is shutting the door on the rest of the world. At times, one feels Gold truly understands the dual nature of the man, both brooding and reclusive…and a funny-man loved by millions.
  
  Structurally there are some imperfections. While ostensibly laid out like a picture show (i,e., newsreel, travelogue, two reel comedy, serial, feature), the fiction chapters that follow the such-named titles don’t strike one as a formally or tonally analogous to those types of films, which is something of a disappointment. One misses this especially in the "feature" section, which lacks the single-minded simplicity of a Chaplin narrative. The parallelism he employs is more symptomatic of Griffith than of a silent comedy, a form which tends to focus like a laser beam on its alienated anti-hero. Instead the book leaps back and forth among three narratives…just as we are warming up to one, the writer drops it and forces us to get reacquainted with another.
  
  As you might expect, the Chaplin thread wins the race for our interest hands down. The two soldier characters are not as finely drawn. My reaction to them was similar to the one I had to Chaplin’s two cabin mates in The Gold Rush when I first saw it as a kid: can’t tell ‘em apart. The soldier in the North Russian campaign (named, amusingly Hugo Black, though he proves not to be the Supreme Court Justice), suffers the most here, as he feels like he belongs in another novel (and for that matter deserves one of his own). The story of the Rin Tin Tin guy (named after the real one, Lee Duncan), seems to marry aspects of two Chaplin films of the same period: A Dog’s Life and Shoulder Arms, providing a nice echo to Chaplin’s work on those very films in the novel. The Russian story needs more tying in, though. There are natural ways this could have been done, the obvious one being Chaplin’s connection to Bolshevism and his ultimate humiliation at the hands of the anti-communist American government (and the ticket buying public) several decades later. The connection doesn’t feel quite made here. Gold mentions major cuts to the novel. I can’t help but suspect this was something that may have been more present in an earlier draft of the book.
  
  I know about the earlier draft because of an excellent Q&A section at the back of the novel, conducted by my brilliant friend Adam McGovern, which is of course how I know about the novel in the first place. I like this ubiquitous new feature of book publishing; it’s like the extras you get with a DVD. Gold is candid and expansive in his comments, and they shine a valuable light on his process. You can read the full interview here.
• 
  V

  I am conflicted about the practice of fictionalizing the stories of actual historical figures. As enjoyable as the story is and as much as I want to believe I've learned a litlte history, I always wonder which parts are factual, which parts are embellished, and which parts are complete fabrications. I feel anxiety about thinking I've learned anything about the people and events presented in the book... like I just found out I've been fed disinformation. How fictionalized was the backstory of Lee Duncan, for instance?
  
  Anxiety aside, I enjoyed Sunnyside very much. Some of the thematic material was left vague, although my own interpretation is that the characters' lives (or at least in the events presented in the book) were supposed to echo the tragicomic quality of Chaplin's work and suggest a universality of this experience. Maybe that's a bush league interpretation. I also was annoyed that Gold left the fate of his wildly intriguing, (completely?) fictional character, Rebecca Golod ambiguous. Is the author trying to make some kind of connection between the character and himself, as his last name is one letter different than hers and she seems to be everywhere in the story? Is she supposed to be some kind of archetype I can't quite identify? Seriously, Rebecca is where it's at in this book.
• 
  Laurie

  Historical fiction featuring Charlie Chaplin by Glen David Gold, whose Carter Beats the Devil I loved with a capital L? I'm there. The first 200 or so pages of this book captivated me as I delved into the three story lines about the young Chaplin (who I have a serious crush on), Lee Duncan (who we learn is the real-life trainer of Rin Tin Tin) and Hugo Black (who gets the shortest end of this narrative stick as he's shipped off to Northern Russia to fight the Bolsheviks during World War I. The secondary cast of characters is almost too numerous to mention but they range from an immigrant family of scammers to three Russian princesses all trying to catch an American G. I. husband. Gold's writing can be absolutely jam-packed with facts and ideas on one hand, and on the other, delicate as when Chaplin leads his mother onto a trolley that will take her out of his life. After those first 200 pages I hope that the story arcs of the three main characters would converge and I was disappointed when they didn't. I also wonder why the Hugo Black portion was included. While his experiences in Russia were harrowing, his story line left me fairly unimpressed. Five stars for the staggering amount of research that clearly framed the novel.