Was It Good for You?

Lin and the Tramp

Maybe I'll choose Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice (Penguin Press) as my book of the year. Writing a detective novel (not to mention voicing your own book trailer) was an inspired move by one of America's great novelists. Who wouldn't root for a Pynchon who dropped some of his more elliptical tendencies for something more like The Big Lebowski? But I didn't read Inherent Vice, which I'm told excludes it from inclusion.

Tao Lin's Shoplifting From American Apparel (Melville House) is inspired. With his fresh approaches to financing his work, not to mention the sheer depth of his blog, Lin marks quite possibly the future, or death, of print literature. However, discussing the life or death of print culture is passé. If only this were 2004.

So then, why not choose the one book I read this year that I'd happily read again: Glen David Gold's Sunnyside (Knopf). In his historical novel, Gold spins several memorable yarns with Charlie Chaplin at their centers. By creating believable human characters – even if they do have recognizable names like Mary Pickford and William McAdoo – Gold draws parallels between the cult of celebrity in the early 20th century and in the early 21st century. From there, he links these cults to nationalism and how that can lead to wars (in Sunnyside's case, World War I). This is a long way of saying that Gold has some literary tricks up his sleeve that can easily go unnoticed. And that's his greatest trick.