In thoughts on the diminishment of the aura of the artifact at a time which tends toward mass-distribution and miniaturization of the image, the sound, the movie and the text to the dimensions of personalized entertainment devices, not as much consideration, even now, is given to the artist in the age of mechanical reproduction. The countrywide apparition of Chaplin at the start of Sunnyside is a spontaneous projection showing that at this early stage in the progression of both his career and the mass-media canon there already were as many “Chaplin”s as there were perceptions of and perspectives on him.
“Image control” is a buzzword of modern PR, but any image by its nature is ephemeral, and disperses and refracts in the way Chaplin’s personality does at the beginning of the book. Not only does the work “have a life of its own,” but the maker himself is out of his own hands. [click to continue…]

One of the snags with really great artists is that they feed the illusion that the past is comprehensible: reading Jane Austen or listening to Beethoven, I can register a different set of manners and assumptions without feeling that there’s something utterly alien going on. (Critics generally settle for the adjective “timeless”.) Watching Charlie Chaplin, on the other hand, I’m always conscious of the chasm between then and now, how different modern times are from anything that went before. I don’t think this sense of strangeness has much to do with the question of whether we find him funny or not (the idea that Chaplin isn’t funny has fallen out of fashion in recent years, and I think it’s generally recognised that some of the time he’s very funny). But leaving aside Chaplin’s astoundingly deft comic shtick, the whole emotional world of the films seems primitive and impenetrable; I have trouble swallowing the Little Tramp himself as a sympathetic character, though the audiences a century back don’t seem to have felt any ambivalence.

I’m leading up to a proposition: that Chaplin has slipped out of our grasp. [click to continue…]

I had a simply heart-breaking experience, reading Sunnyside. (Strictly, I listened to it on Audiobook. So the following page numbers, courtesy of Amazon search-inside, do not correspond to my original ‘reading’ experience.)

Leland “Lee Duncan” Wheeler is about to audition.

The house lights went up momentarily, for the judges to introduce themselves. Each in turn stood up, announced his or her associations, then sat. Mrs. Franklin Geary, head of the Liberty Loan Committee, Christopher Sims of the Institute for Speech Benevolence … (246)

Then, on p. 256.

“We didn’t understand half of what he was doing. Mr. Sims, did you understand what he was doing?”

“I liked the kick to the face.”

Mrs. Geary frowned. “I thought he was swimming.”

You get it? Sims? Of the ISB? And the kick to the face seals the deal. I was so proud I spotted it. I emailed Sims to report my discovery of this wonderful Easter Egg and … he’d … already noticed it … himself. Way to let the air out of my little Easter Egg.

But now you know. That’s something they can put on my tombstone, I guess. [click to continue…]

On first reading, Sunnyside seems to be a picaresque with a sting in the tail. In the best spirit of Chaplin’s films, this rambling story of World War I and the movies uses slapstick and pathos to wring out tears of laughter and sadness. Many readers set it down, bemused, scratching their heads, wondering what, if anything, it was all about. Some reviewers said it was an ambitious failure. Sunnyside is a book you need to live with for a while as it unwraps itself. Or not. Like the best comedy, it’s a response, though not an answer, to the despair of the human condition. And it’s very, very funny.

What does it mean to ‘get’ a book, or at least to think you have? It’s something that happens in a reader’s mind when the characters, story, feelings and ideas of a novel unite into something greater than their sum, becoming a complete world of their own, a world that teaches true things about the world we live in. A good book that sits uncomfortably in its own era resists understanding just as it teaches you how to read it. Sunnyside is the sort of book you think about for a long time after reading, and will probably come back to again. [click to continue…]

The Importance of Story in Sunnyside

In a narrative bursting with stories, fictions, verbal sleight-of-hand, deliberate lies and other debateable information, Glen David Gold’s Sunnyside has a very strained relationship with its own truth and reality. There are so many examples, large moments and set plays which explore this – and which I will investigate later – but to me the crux of Sunnyside is expressed in a small running gag: that of Chaplin himself entering a Chaplin lookalike competition, and only coming in fourth.

It’s a familiar joke –an urban legend that has also been attributed to Elvis Presley, amongst others  – and one that perfectly encapsulates the problem that so many of the characters in the novel face: they don’t really know who they are; and more importantly, they don’t know how they portray themselves to others. They are stitched together from uncertain memories, false information and a diet of lies: whether that be from parents, the government or from the cinema. All they have are their stories and, just as in the result of Chaplin’s lookalike contest, nothing is to be taken for granted.

Gold unnerves us with  this lack of certainty as early as the preliminary pages of the book. The quotation that greets us – I was loved, Mary Pickford – is immediately subverted by her being cast in the starring line-up as “an enemy”.  These are clues that point to the myriad delusions that befall America, including the umpteen sightings of Chaplin on the same day, seemingly a whole nation experiencing something impossible, and yet still believing it. As Gold himself puts it: “Such is the nature of the inexplicable that, as long as it does not involve money, it can be ignored.” [click to continue…]

A year after I first trailed it, here is the Crooked Timber seminar on Sunnyside,
by Glen David Gold, who also wrote Carter Beats the Devil. Sunnyside is a vast, shiny, dark and funny novel about Charlie Chaplin, the birth of modern celebrity, America’s diffidence and then wild enthusiasm for World War I, two genius puppies and their fame-seeking GI owner, an apple-cheeked criminal prodigy, and a Detroit devotee of Ruskin’s attempt to rescue three Russian princesses from the Red Army.

I’m a little nervous of the pronouncement that this novel is about the themes it evokes and the questions it implies, not least because it might lessen the fun of reading it and hitting on these questions yourself. But I want to stake very firmly the claim that this book needs to be gobbled up, because picaresque is serious stuff.

Sunnyside made me laugh out loud in public and on my own, pepper Wikipedia with historical queries, plague family and friends with its insights and asides, and cry the embarrassing, heaving sobs of true loss, not the fictive kind. And, annoyingly, in the middle of a grand World War I narrative where faceless millions perish mostly off-screen, Sunnyside made me care very much if the dog makes it. [click to continue…]