26 THE LIST 25 Jun—9 Jul 2009
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He might not work fast, but what Glen David Gold lacks in swiftness he makes up for in his ability to tell beautiful, intricate stories. Doug Johnstone is the hare to his tortoise
len David Gold is not a writer who
likes to be hurried. The American
author’s debut novel, Carter Beats the Devil. was a big commercial and critical success upon its publication in 2001. A fictionalised account of real-life American magician Charles Carter in the l920s, the novel was brilliantly plotted, superbly researched, dazzlingly executed and compulsively entertaining.
With his reputation riding high, there was surely pressure to rush out a second novel. Instead, Gold retrenched for eight years to work on his next opus. But it’s definitely been worth the wait.
Sunnyside is an astonishing piece of work, a novel that surprises and charms at every turn. Like its predecessor, Sunnyside is historical fiction, set between 1916 and 1919, and loosely built around the life of Charlie Chaplin. There are three main narrative threads — Chaplin’s period of creative and personal crisis, America’s disastrous military campaign against the Bolsheviks in northwestern Russia and the story of an aspiring movie actor who winds up in the thick of World War One in France.
These threads and many more minor ones are , woven together into a whole, which is at times breathtaking. Sunnyside blends complex literary ideas with a remarkable knack for storytelling, managing to be, by turns, hilarious, poignant, gripping, silly, action- packed and profound. It is extraordinarily ambitious, but ambition doesn’t seem to frighten Gold one bit.
‘Carter had an incredibly ambitious plot, like trying to put together a Swiss watch,’ he says cheerily. ‘Whereas this book was more like putting together an 88-piece orchestra and hoping it made sense.’
The 45-year-old writer. who lives in San Francisco with his wife Alice Sebold, author of the million-selling phenomenon The Lovely Bones, says the inspiration for Sunnyside led on from researching his debut novel. In that book, Charles Carter was a contemporary of Houdini, and it was while researching Houdini that Gold fell for Chaplin.
‘I saw a picture of Houdini and Chaplin hugging,’ he says. ‘It struck me Houdini was the first “most famous man in the world” in the modern sense. He wasn’t a king or a pope, he was famous because he wanted to be famous. Chaplin was his successor, but there was something different about Chaplin’s fame, and I wanted to understand that.’