Shawn Towner reviewed Sunnyside by Glen David Gold
Review of 'Sunnyside' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
Sunnyside, Glen David Gold’s second novel, starts off with the type of magic that one might expect to find in his first novel, Carter Beats the Devil. That is a roundabout and inelegant (did I really just use ‘one’ instead of ‘you’?) way of saying that at the start of the novel, Charlie Chaplin is seen in over 800 places at the same time. Despite its supernatural start, Sunnyside is, lamentably, not a novel about Charlie Chaplin and his awesome powers of duplication/teleportation. While the novel is about Chaplin, he doesn’t have magic powers, other than his power to entertain. Sunnyside focuses largely on Chaplin’s attempts to move from silly two-reelers to something better and more profound. When Gold is focusing on the magic of the silent cinema, Sunnyside is at its best. However, in what could be an homage to silent epics, Sunnyside is a triptych, with …
Sunnyside, Glen David Gold’s second novel, starts off with the type of magic that one might expect to find in his first novel, Carter Beats the Devil. That is a roundabout and inelegant (did I really just use ‘one’ instead of ‘you’?) way of saying that at the start of the novel, Charlie Chaplin is seen in over 800 places at the same time. Despite its supernatural start, Sunnyside is, lamentably, not a novel about Charlie Chaplin and his awesome powers of duplication/teleportation. While the novel is about Chaplin, he doesn’t have magic powers, other than his power to entertain. Sunnyside focuses largely on Chaplin’s attempts to move from silly two-reelers to something better and more profound. When Gold is focusing on the magic of the silent cinema, Sunnyside is at its best. However, in what could be an homage to silent epics, Sunnyside is a triptych, with two additional plots dealing with World War I. One of the these two plots works well, as it loosely ties into the Chaplin plot, but the third storyline feels tacked on, until the very end, where the last two pages fit in nicely with the themes of the other two plots.
As mentioned earlier, the best parts of Sunnyside are those that focus on Charlie Chaplin. Although I will admit that the Chaplin plot made me feel pretty ignorant. I thought I knew a thing or two about silent film short comedies, but it turns out I recognized more of the Mary Pickford references than I did the Chaplin references. Now I have to go back and watch whatever Chaplin shorts I can find on Netflix to better my understanding of Chaplin’s transition between simple comic shorts and the more profound longer work. Best I can tell from the novel, Chaplin is frustrated by the emotional response people have to Mary Pickford films and wants them to have the same type of response to the Little Tramp character. Chaplin struggles to find his happy place (Sunnyside is basically a metaphor for the happy place the main characters are trying to find) which mirrors the struggle one of the other main characters faces on the Western Front of WWI.
The secondary and tertiary plots of Sunnyside take place in World War I. The better of the two focuses on Lee Duncan, a wannabe actor who gets what he thinks is going to be his big break in the States, only to be framed for a crime and forced to enlist in the service. As he works as a mechanic in the Air Service, he struggles to deal with the betrayal of his mother (which also mirrors Chaplin’s problems with his mother) and what appears to be the end of his film career. Eventually the combination of a flamethrower, two puppies (one heroic, one deceitful), and a film of a lame-trick performing great dane, motivate Duncan to follow his dream in Hollywood.
The second plot works well because Duncan’s problems relate to Chaplin’s. Although one is a struggling actor and the other is arguably the world’s biggest movie star, they both have a love for the cinema and want to devote their lives to it. The third plot, excepting the final few moments, has little to do with the cinema, which makes it a tad extraneous. The third plot details the exploits of Hugo Black, a Private assigned to Archangel, Russia. Unlike, Chaplin or Duncan, Black doesn’t seem to be seeking anything specific. He wanders from minor adventure to minor adventure, driving trains, dancing with exiled princesses, and shooting people in the head with a crossbow. Head-shooting crossbow antics notwithstanding, Pvt. Hugo Black lends nothing to the novel. At the very end of his plot arc, his commanding generals sees a roomful of Russian peasants overcome with emotion while watching a Mary Pickford film, which is a wonderful way to tie the plot back into the main Chaplin plot.
The superflous third nipple of a plot aside, Sunnyside is a wonderful novel. It captures the obsessive genius of Chaplin and the popularity of the Little Tramp and Mary Pickford, taking the reader back to a time when movie stars were charismatic and awesome, not dumbass frat boys and coked-up skank. A time when men were men, women were submissive objects of affection and/or prostitutes, and dogs could throw hand grenades. A simpler time.
