America in an exuberant age

Flamboyant cities, the precarious road west: the expansive history of the United States before the Civil War is a novel's canvas for mystery and discovery.

By Allen Barra, Special to the Times
Published March 11, 2007

"One of the absolutes of bookchat land," wrote Gore Vidal several years ago in the New York Review of Books - presumably after being stung by some bookchatters - "is that the historical novel is neither history nor novel." Those chatters may have a point; for a long time, first-rate American historical novels have been few and far between.

Perhaps acceptance of the historical novel as literature depends on perspective. British, French and Russian novelists long ago accepted that historical fact could be blended into a work of the imagination.

But then, they've been around a lot longer; it's hard to get a bead on history until it becomes history. But the last four decades or so have probably produced more quality American historical novels than the previous century and a half.

Thomas Berger's Little Big Man (1964) and The Return of Little Man (1999), Michael Shaara's Killer Angels (1974), E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1975), Vidal's Lincoln (1984) and Kevin Baker's recent chronicle of New York's secret history, the "City of Fire" trilogy, quickly spring to mind. Kurt Andersen's exhilarating new opus, Heyday, deserves instant acceptance into their ranks.

Heyday explores previously uncharted territory in American historical fiction. In 1848, a young English aristocrat, Benjamin Knowles, is taken by the sight of a lovely young woman who is "illuminated by a pool of gaslight." Knowles sees all things American in a romantic haze. As a boy in England, he dreamed of the American frontier: "When he practiced shooting his longbow, he no longer imagined himself one of Henry V's archers at Agincourt but James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, hunting game in some wild, infinite American forest."

The character of Knowles enables us to see the sprawl of pre-Civil War America through a foreigner's eyes. Through Ben's acquaintance with Duff Lucking (a Mexican war veteran haunted by both his compliance in a unjust war and his subsequent desertion) and his sister Polly (a part-time actor and prostitute with whom Knowles falls in love), we are allowed a cutaway view of New York in the 1840s, a city that "has the air of the permanent carnival about it, as if half its population were on a spree."

Andersen, author of Turn of the Century and co-founder of Spy magazine, unabashedly plays off conventions established by Dickens (Andersen has a talent for names that Dickens would envy, such as Paragrine "Perry" Christmas, Truman Codwise and Ninian Bobo) and Victor Hugo (the plot is propelled by a murder in Paris during the 1848 revolution, with an avenger who makes Javert seem as ineffectual as Inspector Clousseau).

Heyday's plot, with Knowles and Lucking searching for Polly across the American wilderness all the way to Gold Rush California while all are pursued by the Frenchman, is an obvious device to give us a sightseeing tour of North and Central America at a time just before modernity, in the form of the steam engine, railroads and the telegraph, overwhelmed the primitive, buffalo-strewn West.

The westward trek is the engine that propels the story, fueled by the characters' exuberance at being American and alive in such a fabulous era in history. Andersen offers a vision of the America of 160 years ago, or at least as Americans might have seen it then: as an opportunity for freedom and self-realization and for leaving behind the limitations and cynicism of Europe.

"The Garden of Eden and Gomorrah merged into a single estate," observes Duff's friend, a journalist named Skaggs, while passing through the Isthmus of Panama on the way to California. The judgment could stand as all the characters' reactions to the New World. If the idea of Eden and Gomorrah seem contradictory, the America of Heyday, like Whitman's America, is big enough to encompass the contradiction.

Allen Barra reviews books regularly for Salon.com. He was a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2006.

The book

Heyday - A Novel

By Kurt Andersen

Random House, 622 pages, $26.95