BOOK REVIEW

‘Sunnyside: A Novel’ by Glen David Gold

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Charlie Chaplin is a central player in this big, engaging novel, which takes on early Hollywood and Los Angeles, movie storytelling and the arrival of modernity.

By Richard Rayner

Los Angeles Times

May 17, 2009

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Sunnyside

A Novel

Glen David Gold

Alfred A. Knopf: 576 pp., $26.95

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Glen David Gold’s massive new novel begins with a trick, a coup, the literary equivalent of sleight of hand. For a writer whose first book, “Carter Beats the Devil” (2001), concerned the grand story of a 1920s magician, this should come as no surprise. Gold re-creates time periods as E.L. Doctorow did in “Ragtime,” mingling fact and fiction so that the one blends into the other seamlessly. He’s a spellbinder.

“Sunnyside” opens on Nov. 12, 1916. At the northernmost limit of the California coastline, in a lighthouse off Crescent City, the “unfairly handsome” young Leland Wheeler tells his mother, the lighthouse keeper, that there’s a problem. Somebody, and not just anybody, is in trouble at sea, close to the lighthouse, drifting toward rocks and disaster, with the ocean dumping water into his boat.

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