Product Description

From the author of the acclaimed CARTER BEATS THE DEVIL comes a grand entertainment with the brilliantly realized figure of Charlie Chaplin at its centre: a novel at once cinematic and intimate, thrilling and darkly comic, which dramatizes the moment when American capitalism, a world at war, and the emerging mecca of Hollywood intersect to spawn an enduring culture of celebrity.

SUNNYSIDE follows three overlapping fortunes: Leland Wheeler, son of the last (and worst) Wild West star, as he heads to the battlefields of France; snobbish Hugo Black, drafted to fight in Russia under the British general, Edmund Ironside; and Chaplin himself, contending with studio moguls, accusations of cowardice, his unchecked heart and, most menacing of all, his mother, as he pursues the goal of making a movie ‘as good as he was’.

With a cast of enthralling characters both historical and fictional, SUNNYSIDE is a heart-rending, spellbinding novel about dreams, ambition and the dawn of the modern age.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #79930 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-25
• Binding: Hardcover
• 576 pages

Review
'A kaleidoscopic tale of romance and intrigue...This is a book to remind you of the pleasures of chuckling aloud in public...After a dazzling debut, he has managed to pull off a consummate, ambitious encore. Sunnyside is a cane-twirling, bowler-doffing triumph' (Christian House, Independent on Sunday )

'Dazzling...a gloriously enjoyable read, with pleasures on almost every page: a novel of which Chaplin, the supreme entertainer, would have been proud' (Dominic Sandbrook, Daily Telegraph )

'An insanely ambitious novel...entertaining and thought-provoking' (Aravind Adiga, Financial Times )

'A rare fictional portrayal of this enigmatic figure, and Gold’s rendition is marvellous...a nuanced portrait that is as moving, and at times as funny, as Chaplin’s best works' (Michael Saler, Times Literary Supplement )

'An epic – and suitably cinematic – tale...Gold displays a prodigious gift for storytelling, with a succession of scintillating set pieces and audacious one-liners...fantastic' (Time Out )

'A breathless stupendous novel...From lighthouse to Hollywood to starlets to war to stardom to madness to genius Gold's startling narrative carries us across the world and back. Gold proves himself yet again to be the hungriest craftiest funniest and most humane novelist we have.' (Junot Díaz )

'An elegant blend of reality and fiction, war drama and Hollywood glamour . . . It is wholly exhausting and entirely satisfying: to borrow an idea from Chaplin's great personal-artistic quest in the book, it's a work as good as Gold.' (Publishers Weekly )

'This brimming saga begins in 1916 with a bang and never lets up...The cascade of historic details Gold generates is breathtaking, but it is his electrifying characters, wildly inventive action replete with comedic mishaps and witty dialogue, and trenchant insights into the absurdity of war and the mythic dimension of movies that gather force and velocity to make this such a hilarious, brilliant, and transporting novel.' (Booklist )

About the Author
Glen David Gold was born in Hollywood and raised in San Francisco where he began his life-long love of the strange and dazzling aspects of history. His first novel, CARTER BEATS THE DEVIL was published in 2001, when it was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and has been translated into 14 languages. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Alice Sebold.

Customer Reviews

'Over the Top!'
Gold's début, Carter Beats The Devil, was a brilliant, enjoyable, gripping, escapist thriller. Published back in 2001, it has been a long wait for this follow up, and perhaps to compensate for the delay it is a beast at over 550 pages. It is almost inevitably a disappointment, which isn't to say that it doesn't have its moments. It does, and plenty of them. In fact it is a bravura performance, Gold showing the range and versatility of his writing, fictionalising famous faces, creating wonderful new characters and handling set pieces with the confidence of a Hollywood director but he also supplies the phrase which best sums up the book as a whole: 'une fausse idée claire' - 'a beautiful idea that doesn't work'. That sounds far more damning than I mean it to because it is only that it doesn't quite work.

Gold begins his book with a moment of mass hysteria. On November 12th 1916, as America was poised uncertainly before the war in Europe, people saw or fully expected to see Charlie Chaplin in over 800 separate locations simultaneously. Leland Wheeler is involved in a rescue attempt from the lighthouse where his mother Emily is the keeper, Chaplin's trademark bowler hat disappearing beneath the waves before he is able to reach him. Hugo Black is caught up in a near riot at a train station. Both of these men will later be embroiled in the war in differing ways as too will Chaplin himself, becoming involved in the Liberty Loan Drive after being portrayed as a 'Slacker' in the press. At this early stage of his career, having already made almost 60 films, he has yet to make the film 'as good as' he is, and we follow his conflict with Mary Pickford, friendship with Douglas Fairbanks and his meeting with the young girl Mildred, who will go on to become his first wife.

Despite the focus on Wheeler and Black the star of the show has to be Chaplin of course and there is so much that Gold has got right in his treatment of one of the great flawed icons. His creativity, his cruelty, his coldness towards and fear of a mother crippled by mental degradation. His naiveté is charming at times, sickening at others and Gold's great achievement is to portray a man not only deserving of our sympathy and censure at the same time but also a man so aware of his unworthiness that 'he wanted the world to love him forever so he could tell them, forever, what idiots they were for doing so.'

The build up to the Third Liberty Loan Drive in San Francisco is perhaps the books strongest section, uniting many of its disparate characters and chugging along with an energy that is infectious, the drive to go 'Over the Top' and raise the $210million needed to finance the war for the next few months. Here, even Chaplin is caught up in the atmosphere, swallowing his hatred of Mary Pickford (in a coat so long 'it looked as if a sable had eaten her') as he enters a bidding war with Fairbanks to kiss her in front of the assembled hordes (the scene's electric frisson provided by the scandalous potential of such a public demonstration of Pickford and Fairbanks' notorious affair).

So far I have only mentioned the principal players but with some of the supporting roles Gold builds the novel up from light entertainment to 'novel of ideas'. The philosophy of film from Hugo Münsterberg and the quantifying of celebrity by financial wizard William McAdoo are just two examples of how Gold attempts to locate the moment at which the words Hollywood and fame came to inhabit the meaning we give them today, the moment when America lost its innocence.

Gold has made an admirable attempt to marshal all that material (and I've only mentioned some of it). The book is structured as an evening's entertainment coming in six sections: Newsreel, Travelogue, Two-Reel Comedy, Serial, Feature Presentation and Sing-Along. It is preceded by a Cast List and finished with Credits and the filmic references continue throughout. 553 pages is never going to be an evening's entertainment and like any bloated film-of-ideas there are problems with pace. Gold often attempts to keep the pages turning by ending chapters with a tease, some of which are particularly unsubtle.

The fact remains that the most interesting parts of the book are those which contain Chaplin. Gold has a unique ability to capture the magical in his writing and his descriptions of performance or Chaplin's search for creativity are riveting. On a personal level Chaplin's almost-seduction of Pickford's screenwriter Frances at a Hollywood party is another highlight. But you miss him when he isn't there and the long sections detailing Leland's nurturing and training of two puppies (I told you I'd only mentioned some of the vast narrative) may be great if you're a dog lover like Gold but a bit boring frankly if, like me, you're not that fussed. But I don't want to be too harsh here. As I said at the top, Gold may even be aware of his failings by providing that phrase which describes them. It's important to remember that the idea is beautiful (and brave and interesting and original) it just doesn't quite work. By writing such a brilliant book as his first Gold has made himself a tough act to follow, and with such clear gifts as a writer he may be struggling, like Chaplin, to write the book 'as good as he is'. With that kind of personal discipline the rest of us are going to have a lot of fun reading what comes next. I just hope we don't have to wait another eight years to read it.

Sunnyside Down
Carter Beats the Devil, Glen David Gold's marvellous debut novel, was set largely in the showbiz environment of stage magic and had as its central character a fictionalised version of a real Golden Age magician and his (fictional) involvement in the death of (real) US president Warren Harding.

Sunnyside, Gold's long awaited follow up, at first glance has a similar starting point, focusing on another branch of showbiz - movies - and is also centred on a real prominent individual, the iconic figure of Charlie Chaplin. Again Gold weaves many other actual people and events into an engrossing fictional web. But here the scale and ambition are larger, and the tone and mood while occasionally comic, is less exhilarating than Carter, tending instead to the gloomy and unresolved.

Gold's Chaplin is a tortured genius, weighed down by so many problems and frustrations that he is trapped in a creative dead end. He is an intriguing, flawed, but also somewhat tiresome, character who needs something that his Tramp character was good at dishing out - a good kick in the pants. At least these parts of the book provide an opportunity for a fascinating scrutiny of Hollywood's early years, the struggle for dominance between the stars and the moguls, the changing face of Los Angeles as the film-makers discover its quiet canyons and hills, the burgeoning cult of celebrity, the magnetic pull that could attract royalty and revolutionaries. But this is also the period of the First World War and the novel also covers part of the American (and Allies) adventures in France and Russia.

The book starts on the day of 12 November 1916, when there were over 800 sightings of Chaplin across the USA, a form of mass hysteria that illustrate just how pervasive Chaplin or rather his Little Fellow persona had become. This serves to introduce, as well as Chaplin himself, the other two main characters. First there is Leland Duncan, a movie star handsome `hero' who via a series of misfortunes ends up looking after a pair of puppy dogs in a war ravaged area of France. Yes, really. (Duncan incidentally is also a based on a real person). The third protagonist is the pretentious and glum Hugo Black, a not very appealing character who by ill luck finds himself in the ranks of a motley multinational military force in a hell-frozen-over part of Russia supposedly there to fight the Bolsheviks (or Bolos).

Each section is modelled on part of the programme of an old time night at the movies (newsreel, serial, comedy short) and so the book flicks back and forth between the three protagonists, perhaps intending to reflect that monument of silent cinema Intolerance, where cross cutting was supposedly deployed for the first time. Teeming with characters and incidents both grand and small, the book is really a series of audacious set pieces that switch between comedy, tragedy, irony and melodrama.

Taken as a whole, Sunnyside is much less focused than Carter, and Gold seems to be straining to be more consciously literary. The sentences are frequently dense and packed with obsessive detail which often feels too much like unnecessary clutter. A small example; Hugo Black has disembarked with the rest of the 339th Infantry Regiment at the Russian Port of Archangel: "Soon the Americans stood in formation dockside...There was a tang of marine waste and metal slurry, a hint of old sawdust. It reminded Hugo of the ghostliness of the hoop-and-stave works, which he and his father, the engineer of engineers, visited on Sundays."

I don't know about you, but my experience of hoop-and-stave works isn't vast, so why the tang of marine waste, metal slurry and old sawdust should remind Hugo of one makes for a pretty arcane comparison. Are productive hoop-and-stave works always ghostly or are just the specific ones that Hugo is remembering ghostly? Were they ghostly because they were abandoned or because they didn't operate on Sundays? Have I forgotten an earlier reference to a hoop-and-stave works that would explain why one has been mentioned now? There are quite a few examples of this sort of unenlightening hyper detail which rather than aid or clarify understanding just get in the way.

There is no denying that many passages and sections taken individually are entertaining and engrossing but overall Sunnyside lacks the consistency and gripping narrative of Carter Beats the Devil. It is the, sometimes dazzling, parts that one comes away admiring rather than the whole.

Chaplin's redemption is just worth the wait
Glenn David Gold's follow-up to "Carter Beats the Devil", his massively entertaining debut novel, may well disappoint fans hoping for a repeat of the nail biting plotting and historical reconstruction of that magnum opus, but there are enough high spots to excite any readers excited by ideas and style.

"Sunnyside" has taken 8 years to get to us and weighs in at a formidable 555 pages. In it he develops some of the ideas about celebrity and personality he began to develop in "Carter" but eschews the page turning plotting that kept that book so alive. But this is a much more considered attempt to analyse a key point in the development of modern America as Hollywood gets it legs and begins to establish itself in the public psyche. He centers on Charlie Chaplin, the king of the two reel silent comedies, who has established a power base for himself, but who is beginning to dry up artistically. Meanwhile the Hollywood entrepreneurs are trying to broaden the market for films to claim the artistic and intellectual market they are currently missing. All this is at the time when America enters the WW1, the first war in which film played a central part in portraying the supposed reality of war.

To hold all this together he invents a plot about two outsiders who join the war in Belgium and Russia respectively through a series of co-incidences that pull them both within Chaplin's orbit. Their naratives are designed to counterpoint the prevailing images that Americans are presented and to underpin his general analysis of the way that film narrative undermines popular perceptions. However, it is in this area that Gold has difficulties in sustaining the pace and liveliness of the Hollywood scenes.

In its depiction of Hollywood and the characters that populate it, Gold's style is reminiscent of EL Doctorow. His potrayal of Chaplin, Fairbanks and Pickford is very entertaining and these are interspersed with some brilliant set-pieces that, occasionally, rival those of his previous novel. But this is much more ambitious thematically and perhaps it is this which holds it back.

For the patient reader, however, this entertaining book offers rewards as it moves towards its deeply moving and hopeful conclusion as the characters' fates are sealed.