The Confessions of Edward Day by Valerie Martin
Orange Prize-winning author Valerie Martin from New York State, USA.
At the start of Orange prize-winner Valerie Martin’s engrossing new novel, the ambitious actor who narrates it has his life saved by another man. While holidaying with some fellow thespians, 22-year-old Edward Day finds himself all at sea after falling from a pier during a night-time stroll. In danger of drowning, he is saved at the last minute by Guy Margate, a moody, mysterious actor who bears an ominous resemblance to Edward. Although apparently a blessing, the rescue turns into a curse on both their lives.
Their relationship almost immediately takes a sinister turn. Guy asks Edward for a substantial loan, then starts to hit on his new girlfriend, the beautiful but emotionally brittle Madeleine. Edward’s increasingly urgent desire to get away from Guy is tempered by a strong sense of obligation. “If he had not jumped in to save me,” he confesses, “I would have drowned. I couldn’t deny it; I owed him my life and my obligation was a bond that must endure between us forever.”
Martin follows this tortuous relationship over the next few years as the two men try to ascend the greasy pole of their profession in 1970s New York. Guy is first to get the upper hand, landing a choice part in a new play in which he gets to parade his choicest part during a full-frontal nude scene. His performance wins him the twin holy grails of a young actor’s life: an Equity card and an agent. Edward, meanwhile, founders in a play about criminal activity in a bakery. The reviews are scathing, including one that calls him “a mincing, predatory fop”. Off stage, the two men continue to duel over Madeleine, who is notably less contemptuous of Guy’s nude strut than Edward.
The tables are slowly turned, however, when Edward begins to land the good roles just as Guy’s career founders. Their rivalry over Madeleine also undergoes an important shift during a summer Edward spends performing at a festival in rural Connecticut. Relations among this desperately intimate threesome explode when Edward and Madeleine are cast together in a big production of Uncle Vanya, while an unemployed and increasingly volatile Guy is left to stew in the wings.
The best thing about Martin’s novel is its portrait of the life of an actor. Callbacks, table-waiting jobs, endless classes and petty jealousies are detailed with wry accuracy. There is a wonderful evocation of the hell of summer stock, where ambitious young actors are consigned to performing, “night after night, to audiences of 40 or 50 who looked on like lost children in the wilderness of empty seats. Their applause sounded like dried peas rattling in a tin can”.
Martin’s ease with the world of the theatre allows her to have a fine old time with characters such as Teddy Winterbottom, the scion of a rich family who thinks he’s had an artistic breakthrough when he ditches his pretty fiancée for a creepy Greenwich Village artist named Wayne. Madeleine is also a powerful creation, as flighty as the Chekhov characters she excels at playing. And Guy’s brooding Brandoesque confidence conceals a soul that is surprisingly feeble.
Martin has set herself a harder task with her hero. Since the novel is his confession, Edward is the one character the author cannot hide behind an elaborate mask. We see right into his soul, and it is not a pretty sight, fractured as it is at an early age by the suicide of a narcissistic mother. From that moment on, Edward navigates through his turbulent life using his own self-interest as a north star, including one supremely selfish moment when his only response to a tragedy that befalls someone close to him is to worry about its effect on his performance at the following day’s matinee. It is a testament to the author’s skill that Edward’s shortcomings only serve to make the book more enjoyable. He may be a monster, but if the theatre teaches us nothing else, it is that monsters are often the characters who get the biggest applause.
Sunnyside by Glen David Gold, Sunday Times, July 26, 2009.
August 2, 2009
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.
