Sunnyside by Glen David Gold
Glen David Gold’s bustling second novel opens with an evocative if seldom remembered event — the day in 1916 when America underwent what was almost certainly its first media-inspired mass hallucination. From sea to shining sea, citizens reported witnessing Charlie Chaplin in over 800 separate locations, spotting the Little Tramp on buses and main streets, in trains and taxis. He was even reported in a lifeboat. Long before the internet could disseminate rumour at the speed of light, this bizarre visitation demonstrated a star’s ability to enchant the public imagination.
From this magical overture, Gold’s ambitious novel blossoms into several interwoven storylines in an effort to capture a period that saw both the birth of the film industry and the loss of America’s international innocence on the killing fields of Flanders. One of these narratives involves Leland Wheeler, a young lighthouse-keeper who “sees” Chaplin in a raft off the Oregon coast during a storm. The event inspires Wheeler to pursue his own screen ambitions, though his plans soon go awry when he becomes involved with jewel thieves and is forced to enlist in the army to avoid prison. He finds himself in France during the last days of the first world war, where he eventually comes into possession of two alsatians whose remarkable skills just might win him the fame he’s always wanted.
Running in parallel to Wheeler’s story is that of Hugo Black, the son of a wealthy engineer who is almost killed in a riot during that 1916 Chaplin mania. Black, too, finds himself caught up in the war, shipped to Russia with a secret American force that has been dispatched to thwart the newly triumphant Bolsheviks.
And of course there is Chaplin himself, depicted at a moment when his career is in danger of fizzling out. Threatened by the popularity of his chief screen rival, the petite but dangerously competitive Mary Pickford, as well as by the jealousy of lupine studio heads such as Adolph Zukor and Samuel Goldwyn, Chaplin searches with increasing urgency for a way, in the words of a rival film-maker, to make “a film as good as you are”.
It all sounds like the sort of panoramic saga that might have come from the pen of EL Doctorow or William Boyd, and at times Gold reaches those heights, most particularly with a sequence where Wheeler’s estranged father, a Wild West performer with the unlikely name of Percy Bysshe Duncan, comes undone during a command performance for Kaiser Wilhelm. There is also a remarkable passage in which Chaplin nearly seduces a 15-year-old girl at a beach party. Indeed, Gold’s depictions of Chaplin’s struggles, particularly against the studio bosses who are terrified by the prospect of an actor controlling his own destiny, are the best thing about Sunnyside.
Unfortunately, Gold proves less successful in his handling of the novel’s remaining narrative strands. The storyline involving Black has some fine moments, but eventually gets as bogged down as the American mission to Russia itself. Similarly, Wheeler’s tale, in which Gold devotes a lot of ink to the care and feeding of puppies, might wind up putting off even hardcore dog-lovers. Equally daunting is the novel’s vast amount of period detail, which ultimately leaves the reader wondering if he really needs to know the brand of handcuffs deployed by the cop who arrests Duncan, or the exact ways diamonds were measured in 1917. Eventually, this prodigious research saps the novel’s dramatic urgency. It is a mistake Chaplin, who at his best could cram all human life into a few silent reels, would not have made.
