“If it’s 100 years from now and there are still
people, bless you all. I hope you have polar bears.”
So concludes the acknowledgements section of Glen David Gold’s
Sunnyside, a novel so warmhearted and enveloping that you
will read the acknowledgements, every last one of them, because
you won’t want the book to end. And because Gold is a meticulous and
generous writer who doesn’t waste a word of his 559-page novel, you’ll
find, in Sunnyside‘s final lines, that bittersweet salute to
future readers, wishing for them a world in which polar ice floes can
still support a 1,000-pound bear.
In 2001, Gold published Carter Beats the Devil, a virtuosic
debut about a young magician in the 1920s. In the scrupulously
researched novel, Gold trod the edges of what-could-have-been,
populating his fiction with real characters, real circumstances, even
real magic tricks, as the era of the celebrity magician peaked and
faded with the introduction of movies and television.
With Sunnyside, Gold returns to his unique brand of
historical fiction, extracting lively, relevant metaphor from a popular
culture peopled with vividly compelling figures. The hero of
Sunnyside is none other than a youthful Charlie Chaplin, already
a star, though in 1917 he’s yet to make a film “as good as he is.” He’s
also, increasingly, criticized as a “slacker”—an insult levied
against un-enlisted men of fighting age, as WWI propaganda efforts
strategically guilt-tripped the entire country into supporting the war.
Gold draws Chaplin as a charming, restlessly insecure genius, a
perfectionist who skitters from idea to idea, trusting an intuition
that always pans out. He’s also imminently likeable, self-aware and
skeptical of his own fame. One night before a Hollywood party, he
practices introducing himself to the other partygoers: “‘Hullo, I’m
Charles Chaplin,’ he said, extending his arm toward the ceiling. It
sounded pretentious. ‘Hello, everyone. I’m Charlie.’ Was it more
pretentious to leave the ‘Chaplin’ off? It was a Trojan horse of
informality, because it pretended he was Charlie No-One-Special, when
it actually relied on those to whom he was being introduced knowing the
last name themselves.”
Charlie is learning how to be a star, as the very concept of stardom
is evolving alongside his work and that of friends and rivals like Mary
Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. The city, too, is feeling its way; in
chapter after chapter, Gold hacks Hollywood out of the orchards and
bean fields of Southern California, studios and hotels emerging from
the desert. “It was obvious, upon seeing the beaches and hills and
palms,” Gold writes of Hollywood, “that your current self was just a
stand-in for someone not yet arrived. If only you could live in such a
beautiful place, the rest would change. People at their weakest, most
trusting, and childlike moments believed there was out there for them
somewhere a Sunnyside. Which meant the place was eventually 100
two-bedroom bungalows. The mystery not yet solved was how to love a
place when your mere presence destroyed it.”
Charlie is an actor who worries about being a soldier. Parallel to
his story runs that of Leland Wheeler, a soldier who wants to be an
actor; and Hugo Black, a soldier stationed in Russia—which is
not, as it turns out, even a stage. Their stories intertwine and
overlap, as Gold constructs an elaborate and ambitious history of
nothing less than the evolution of modern consciousness.
Sunnyside is the best kind of summer reading, a beautifully
lavish, intelligent novel that begs to be read slowly and closely, from
first line to last.