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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
54 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A fine mess,
This review is from: Sunnyside (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
It's always refreshing to go into a book or movie with low expectations and come out finding that it not only was better than expected, but actually really good. On the other hand, it is always disappointing when you have high expectations - in fact, you're positively inclined to the book even at page one - and then find it is actually not so hot. Sadly, Glen David Gold's Sunnyside fits into this latter category.Gold's first novel was the wonderful Carter Beats the Devil, a book that made me want to see what'd he do next. It took years for Sunnyside to appear, and it wasn't really worth the wait. The title refers to a movie by Charlie Chaplin that was being made during the bulk of the story. Chaplin, in fact, is the central character of the book, though I'd be hard pressed to call him the main character; he only appears in around a third of the book and much of the rest of the time, the story has little to do with him. In fact, it's unclear what Sunnyside is supposed to be about. It seems to be several very loosely connected stories (often tied together only tangentially to Chaplin), none of which are all that interesting. Probably the best plot line in the book follows Lee Duncan who is forced into fighting in World War I and winds up saving a couple puppies from death. In another storyline, Private Hugo Black (apparently no relation to the prominent Supreme Court justice of the mid-Twentieth Century) gets tangled up with the American attempt to squash the Bolsheviks in Russia. Chaplin, meanwhile, tries to make movies, romance women, bolster the war effort and fight the studios. In other words, there is a lot of activity going on, but it really doesn't add up to much. The plot - what there is of it - is muddled. Unlike Carter Beats the Devil, almost all the characters seem remote (except maybe Lee), so it's hard to really identify with them. Only in his description of the story setting - in particular, WWI-era Hollywood - does Gold do okay. On a technical level, Gold writes well, but Sunnyside is like a long hike: you may start out energetic and enjoying it, but in the end, you're trudging along, just waiting for it to all be over.
25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gold Beats the "Carter",
By
This review is from: Sunnyside (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
In 2001 a magical (in more ways than one) first novel by Glen David Gold, entitled "Carter Beats the Devil" was published. It immediately heralded the arrival of a major new writer and caused those of us who read it to begin to wait eagerly for Gold's second novel. We knew, of course, from the outset, that A) it would be well-written since Gold demonstrated the kind of mastery of language that wasn't going to disappear, and B) it couldn't POSSIBLY recapture the magic of "Carter". And we waited... and waited... and, just when we were resigning ourselves to the possibility that Gold would become a sort of Harper Lee for the new millenium, he brought forth "Sunnyside". And we discovered that A) was correct, the language, the style, the characters, were every bit the equal of "Carter". AND B) was correct as well; "Sunnyside" isn't anywhere near "Carter"... it's SO MUCH better. As with "Carter", Gold focuses a lot of attention on a real person, only, where magician Howard Carter was a somewhat obscure character (indeed, I had to look him up to be sure he WAS real), this time it's no less a personage than Charlie Chaplin. And, as with "Carter" Gold blends fact, fiction, and outrageous speculation, into a whole. But, whereas "Carter" essentially became a marvelous anecdote, "Sunnyside" creates an epic world. More I will not tell you, because you MUST read and discover this world for yourself... or you'll regret it for a long time to come.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's not exactly a novel, but...,
By
This review is from: Sunnyside (Kindle Edition)
It's not exactly a novel, but rather a collection of astonishingly well-written scenes in roughly chronological order. This should bother me, except that the scenes are, as I said, astonishingly well-written.If you check out the distribution of ratings here, you'll see this is probably one of the most evenly spread set of ratings for anything on Amazon. People either love it, hate it or somewhere in between, so i have no idea whether you're going to like it. But I loved it. Gold's writing, from the craftsmanship in the prose to the super-fine detailing of the characters to the originality of the plotting, is exactly the sort of polished, inventive storytelling I crave. It's just unusual to find such a fine storyteller writing such a fine novel without telling us a larger story. There's no cohesion here, but there is brilliance. Are you going to like it? Who knows? I sure don't. I'd guess that if you're a fan of his first novel, "Carter Beats the Devil", you're probably more likely to enjoy this. And if you read, say, Les Miserables and loved it because of its digressions and tangents rather than despite them, you're probably in the right place. And if you simply like silent era Hollywood, you'll probably have a good time here as well. For everyone else: just avoid trying to think about how it will all tie together (spoiler alert: it won't) as you read it and you'll probably be in the right frame of mind to appreciate just how good a novel Sunnyside is, despite not actually being a novel.
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