Chaplin, the Treasury Chief and Rin Tin Tin

Hysteria causes sightings of Charlie Chaplin from the Waldorf Astoria to Beaumont, Texas. Mary Pickford sells war bonds with a public kiss for her secret lover, Douglas Fairbanks. Rin Tin Tin's trainer wins $1,282 (Dh4,700) in an army-canine trick contest.

That's not to mention Treasury Secretary William McAdoo haunting Hollywood studios and such fictional players as Rebecca Golod, Girl Scout con artist, and Harvard professor Timofy H Muensterberg, cinema theorist.

Glen David Gold's second novel, Sunnyside, delivers all these marvels and more in a fictional circus partly staffed by historical characters. He performed similar legerdemain with his debut, Carter Beats the Devil, tracing the career of a real magician, Charles Carter, while touching on the death of President Warren G Harding and the invention of television by the young Philo Farnsworth.

Sunnyside offers a richer show, as Gold joins to the main tale, concerning Chaplin's struggle with his latest film, two lesser excursions about a pair of American men pulled into World War I.

Lee Duncan, caught in the Girl Scout con, abandons his dream of a Hollywood career and serves as a fighter-plane mechanic who one day reaches the silver screen via newsreel: "He wasn't sure if it was seeing himself that was so sad, or if it was that he'd had such a small dream all his life."

Hugo Black, the overeducated son of a Detroit engineer, ends up in Archangel, Russia, as part of a vanguard assigned to bring democracy to the Reds. Joseph Heller-esque absurdities are crowned by a visit to a castle to dance with three White Russian princesses whose parents have fled to seek work in Hollywood.

Chaplin moves from bachelorhood through entanglements and marriage to an underage bride. After 65 pictures, he is stalled on a new one called Sunnyside. He tries a zeppelin, nudity, suicide to lend a spark to his faltering project. He's distracted by the success of Pickford, the machinations of rival studios and self-doubt.

"He wanted the world to love him forever so he could tell them, forever, what idiots they were for doing so."

Gold, a gifted, resourceful writer, juggles all these narrative balls with aplomb, producing the entertainment of a great read along with the you-are-there intimacies of historical fiction.

Reality, myth and image are always in question, as they are in Hollywood films, the propaganda of newsreels, the hustle and hyperbole of gossip magazines and the presumption of historical fiction.

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