When It Was Charlie Chaplin's World

• 'Sunnyside'
• Glen David Gold
• Knopf (2009)

Glen David Gold's new novel opens with the death of a globally loved superstar amid scenes of mass delirium, while a futile overseas conflict grinds to its blood-soaked close. So far, so ripped from recent headlines, except Gold's book has been some seven years in the making, the superstar is Charlie Chaplin (and he doesn't really die) and the conflict is the First World War.

But though it may be historical fiction, Sunnyside is resonant beyond accident. It's a sprawling -- too sprawling -- tale about the birth of the modern entertainment age, about Chaplin as the first truly worldwide celebrity, and as far can be made out through the thick overgrowth of sub-plot, digression and incidental characters, an exploration of the way movies and their attendant culture have enchanted, bedazzled, warped and woofed us.

Did I mention it's also about Rin Tin Tin?

1916 was a weird year

The whirl-a-gig opening, in which strange doppelgangers of Chaplin appear across the United States (apparently based on bizarre but real events that took place in November of 1916), is the first of many stunning sections of acrobatic, thrilling writing. We are introduced to three main characters -- on the coast of Northern California, hunky lighthouse keeper with stars in his eyes Leland Wheeler; in Beaumont, Texas, pretentious know-it-all railway engineer Hugo Black; and atop the roof of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, troubled Charles Chaplin, famous already, but standing on the verge of both his greatest artistic achievements and a new, mind-scrambling kind of fame the world had not yet seen before -- as well as the panoramic, continent-leaping, teeming-cast-of-thousands scale of this epic. And here is where the seeds of the book's problems begin to sprout. It's a tale as baggy as the Little Tramp's pants.

But Sunnyside -- named after one of Chaplin's rare early flops -- is no failure. A bit like its namesake, it's an intriguing farrago, a historical hasenpfeffer, a rich, overly complex stew that's well worth any mild indigestion. Gold's first novel, Carter Beats The Devil, was an equally overstuffed, entertaining and heavily researched doorstopper, a romp about a real-life 1920s magician caught up in a web of fictional intrigues. Warren G. Harding, Harry Houdini and Philo Farnsworth, the man who invented the television set, played prominent roles in the convoluted plot. I read it and enjoyed it thoroughly several years ago, but had to go online to remind myself of the details of the book; I'd had a good time, but it hadn't really stuck. Sunnyside, despite its flaws, will remain with me far longer.

Swift borrowings

As plot strands arabesque from San Francisco to the bombed-out fields of France and the frozen reaches of Russia, we meet dozens of intriguing characters. The set pieces mount up -- a bravura account of Chaplin uncomfortable in his skin at a Hollywood party that climaxes with his impersonation of Leon Trotsky; a phantasmagorical, bedraggled Wild West Show in Berlin; a haunted fairy-tale dinner in the icebound Russian woods -- as do the plot threads. We learn about, among myriad topics, dog-breeding, Mary Pickford's keen mind for business, the propaganda value of North American Indian soldiers on the Western Front. It's all fascinating stuff, but it begins to concern the reader. As each new development rears its head, as another fresh character wanders in trailing an entire new book's worth of intrigue, you start to worry if Gold will be able to tie it all together.

He doesn't, really. At least one of the main characters seems completely unnecessary once the last page is turned, his story a diffused dead end that only faintly resonates with the novel's themes (through a considerable bit of authorial stretching in a scene lifted from Sullivan's Travels). Gold seems aware of this; that plot strand is pretty much hijacked by another character mid-stream. Other members of the supporting cast frustratingly disappear. Whither the nefarious Girl Scout? Or the challenging scenario writer?

Apparently the novel was twice its published length in raw manuscript form, and it's a sign of how much I enjoyed it despite its flaws and errors of ambition that I wonder if perhaps it needed that massive scope to fully work. Or it could have been pared down to its central, most intriguing narrative, the story of Chaplin on the verge.

No mind: the book as it exists is well worth any minor inconveniences. Now I'm off to track down a Rin Tin Tin flick.