If you are a silent-film buff - or if you simply enjoy vivid characterization and sprawling imagery - Glen David Gold's "Sunnyside" ($26.95, Alfred A. Knopf) is the novel for you. It's "Ragtime" for early-movie fanatics.
Evidently, Gold never thinks small. His first novel, "Carter Beats the Devil," was a historical novel about magician Charles Carter. The new novel concerns another famous Charles: the first big star of film comedy, Charlie Chaplin. Like a tidal wave, Chaplin pulls countless personalities - many far less famous, but no less fascinating -- in his tide.
The novel begins with what is an inexplicable prototype of the urban legend: a day in 1916 America when several hundred reported sightings of Chaplin took place in separate areas on the same day. From that single event, the stories of several characters are elaborated.
One is Leland Wheeler, a fatherless young man who works with his mother at a seaside lighthouse. Leland has dreams of becoming famous in that recent entertainment creation, motion pictures. Suffice to say that he does so, but not in the way he had intended, and not before losing his heart and his innocence in World War One.
Another is Hugo Black, the son of a mechanics professor. Hugo longs to be a revered train engineer, but he finds his talents snobbily neglected by his peers - until he finds his skills much in demand at the front lines when fighting Russia, by which point Hugo wishes he was far less skillful.
Not the least of the novel's characters is Chaplin himself, so popular a movie star that theater owners needed only to put out a Chaplin standee to bring in moviegoers. In the course of the novel, Chaplin bumps into the famous (his friend Douglas Fairbanks, and Fairbanks' then-paramour Mary Pickford), the less notable (the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury), and countless peripherals (among them Wheeler, Black, and even the Chaplin standees, who make cameo appearances in WWI Russia).
But "Sunnyside" isn't just a name-dropper. Gold fills his canvas with vast scenery and spectacle worthy of a Panavision lens, and a lot of surprisingly heartfelt incident. Among many other virtues, the novel conveys the timely idea that war wasn't any more intelligent or thought-out in 1916 than it is now.
If there's a flaw in the book, it's that Gold often indulges in a bit too much description, conveying his settings in numerous paragraphs where just a few sentences would do just as well. The book weighs in at two pounds (literally, according to Amazon.com) and 559 pages - fairly epic for a book mostly intended as light comedy.
But the oft-precious verbosity is more than outweighed by the story's many emotional payoffs, as when Leland finds - like himself - some unusual, misplaced orphans, or when Chaplin's mentally ill mother visits him in Hollywood.
Like the book's Buffalo Bill wanna-be (another intriguing character), "Sunnyside" is quite a rip-rollicking tale.
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