taken from Goodreads:
"From the author of the acclaimed best seller Carter Beats the Devil comes
a grand entertainment with the brilliantly realized figure of Charlie
Chaplin at its center: a novel at once cinematic and intimate,
thrilling and darkly comic, that 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 opens
on a winter day in 1916 during which Chaplin is spotted in more than
eight hundred places simultaneously, an extraordinary mass delusion.
From there, the novel follows the overlapping fortunes of three men:
Leland Wheeler, son of the world’s last (and worst) Wild West star, as
he heads to the battlefields of France; snobbish Hugo Black, drafted to
fight under the towering General Edmund Ironside in America’s doomed
engagement with Russia; and Chaplin himself, as he faces a tightening
vice of complications—studio moguls, questions about his patriotism,
his unchecked heart, and, most menacing of all, his mother—to finally make a movie “as good as he was.”
With
a cast of enthralling characters, both historical and fictional—Mary
Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, a thieving Girl Scout, a lovestruck film
theorist, Russian princesses, even Rin Tin Tin—Sunnyside is a heartrending, spellbinding novel about American promises both kept and betrayed."
Gold's Carter Beats the Devil is one of my favorite novels, right along with Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; both work to capture a period of American popular culture with a sweeping cast of characters, clever writing, and grand themes about life and love and dreams. This, Gold's second novel (which took forever to come out -- I was so excited to see it on the shelves!) sets out with the same goals, essentially. This book, however, doesn't quite hit the mark, not like the first one did.
That's not to say that Sunnyside isn't a good novel, because it is. In places. One of the issues is that it is just too long and unwieldy -- all the extra characters and details never quite gel, and so there's a lot of unfinished business left at the end. I think this is truly an instance where some clever editing could have whittled this story down into something more polished without losing any of the grandness in the scope of the story.
Gold has a knack for clever details, witty dialogue, and pitch-perfect prose. There were a few misseps, I thought, especially when he tried something different with the perspective or foreshadowing, but in the end, those things didn't end up detracting from some absolutely brilliant scenes, peppered throughout the entire book. Even though there were times when I had no idea where the story was going or how it all fit together, I couldn't help but be drawn in, emotionally, as the story came to a close. There's a lot to think about here; none of it has come together clearly for me yet. I can feel myself still groping through the different scenes, tying them together and making connections among different passages and characters and actions. It's a dense book, and one that has to be read with some degree of concentration and focus -- my reading has been much more spread out lately than I'd prefer, so I feel a little sluggish in pulling all my thoughts together about it.
When I put it down, though, it wasn't with a sigh of relief ("whew, glad it's over"), which is what I was afraid would happen. Instead, I lay awake, thinking, aware that I'd connected with characters in the book in ways I hadn't been aware of while I was reading -- particularly characters that I wasn't sure if I even liked as I read. What struck me the most, at the end, was that despite the humor and witty dialogue, Gold's novel seemed sadder and quieter than I'd expected it to me -- and it was that mood that has stayed with me as I continue to think about these characters.
Each time I finish a book, I have to make a decision. Will this one take up permanent residence on my already overflowing bookshelves, or will it go in the trade pile, to await my next trip to McKay's? This one, I think, deserves another read, and so I'll find a home for it soon.
